Dr. Dana Suskind on Closing the Achievement Gap Through Language

During a June 22 featured talk at the ABC Children’s Institute, Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery at the University of Chicago and director of the Thirty Million Words initiative, detailed how caregivers and booksellers can improve a child’s exposure to language in the first three years of life.

In her book, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain (Dutton), Suskind looks at the growing problem of social inequalities in the country and identifies the disparities in achievement that originate in language differences. “By the end of the age of three, children born into poverty will have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers,” said Suskind.

Hearing more words, and higher-quality words, in the first three years of life enables children to develop not only better language skills, but also stronger socioemotional, literacy, math, spatial reasoning, and executive function skills.

“Language, talk, reading — it is the foundation for all brain development,” said Suskind, whose Thirty Million Words initiative aims to close the achievement gap by showing parents how communication enables optimal brain development.

Reading is a critical component of this program, said Suskind, noting that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends reading with children from birth because kids who are read to from the time they are newborns tend to have larger vocabularies and better math skills.

When Suskind began her work as a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon, she discovered that, despite providing deaf or hard of hearing children with devices that help them process sound, patients were still facing a large learning gap. “The miraculous potential of a cochlear implant came with a very large asterisk,” she said. “While cochlear implantation brought sound to a child’s brain, something else was needed to make those sounds have meaning: language.”

Suskind explained that when we’re born, most of our organs are fully formed; they function, from day one, as they will for the rest of our lives. But our brains start out underdeveloped, and the first three years of life account for 80 to 85 percent of physical brain growth.

When the language environment is weak in the first three years of life, brain development will continue to occur, said Suskind, “but it will never be as robust or as optimal. When the language environment is rich and words are flowing into a baby’s brain, the brain is incredibly active, creating some 700 to 1,000 new neural connections every second. At no other time in life will the brain be so active and so influential.”

Suskind attributes this exceptional growth to neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to learn new skills easily; however, the brain will prune itself when parts aren’t being used. “Once pruning begins, that learning becomes much, much more difficult,” she said.

Through the Thirty Million Words initiative, Suskind hopes to achieve a population-level shift to strengthen the use of language in households with young children. Interventions start at the hospital, after a child’s first hearing screen.

As part of the program, parents and caregivers are encouraged to make use of the three Ts: Tune in to what your child is doing; talk more to your child, using lots of descriptive words; and take turns with your child as you engage in conversation.

But for true change to happen, every parent needs to understand that they are the key architects for their child’s brain, Suskind said, and that their language can help build many different skills.

Because they are face-to-face with parents and caregivers every day, booksellers have the power to make a difference in this country by helping parents understand that reading is a way to bond, and bonding is a way to build the brain, said Suskind. “There’s nothing more powerful than sitting and reading with your child from day one.”