Children’s Institute Speaker Dr. Dana Suskind on How Words Shape a Child’s Future

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At next month’s ABC Children’s Institute in Orlando, Florida, Dr. Dana Suskind will present the featured talk “Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain.” During the talk, to be presented on Wednesday, June 22, Suskind will share how caregivers, policymakers, and booksellers can improve a child’s exposure to language in the first three years of life and how that can impact both their future and that of society.

Suskind is the director of the Thirty Million Words initiative, an evidence-based intervention that serves as the foundation for her book, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain (Dutton), which explores the significant benefits that come from early language exposure for children and provides guidance to enhance home language environments to optimize children’s brain development.

Through her work as a professor of surgery at the University of Chicago and director of university’s program that outfits children with cochlear implants — small, electronic devices that provide a sense of sound to deaf or hard-of-hearing people — Suskind began to see profound differences in outcome among the children given cochlear implants.

“Some of them would be talking and learning on par with their hearing peers, and others would barely be able to communicate,” Suskind recently told Bookselling This Week. “It was seeing that difference — I did this same surgery and had such different outcomes — that led me on this journey to figure out why and, more importantly, what I could do to help all of my patients reach their potentials.”

Through early studies on child development conducted by researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley beginning in the 1960s, Suskind learned that by the end of the age of three, some children will have heard 30 million fewer words than their peers, with that division often running along socioeconomic lines. That difference in number affects children’s vocabulary, their test scores, and their IQs, said Suskind.

“The difference that I was seeing in my patients really had little to do with hearing loss, but rather the language environments they were born into,” said Suskind. “If we are going to give each of my patients and every child in this country the same opportunity to reach their potentials, we really have to understand the science and allow all caregivers to make good on it.”

Booksellers are part and parcel of getting this message out, said Suskind, and they also provide one of the most important tools for building brain development: books.

“If people understood that it’s not just about reading the book, but really sharing the book and having a conversation — especially in those early years — it would change the world,” said Suskind. “Three books a day keep the doctor away.”

Between the ages of zero and three, as much as 85 percent of the brain is developed, said Suskind, so caregiver language and interaction early on are critical elements to shaping a child’s future. Early language exposure affects not just vocabulary and literacy, but all aspects of brain function — including math skills, spatial abilities, executive functioning, and socioemotional development.

The adult-child bond provides the conduit for language to be relayed, and a book is one of the most powerful venues for that interaction, said Suskind. In fact, a critical component of the parent-child programs offered through Thirty Million Words is caregivers and children sharing the experience of reading a book.

“That’s why book reading and book sharing is so critical in this effort, because at no other time do you get the richness of language and interaction as through a book. Books are just an incredible way to build a child’s brain,” said Suskind.


Join Dr. Dana Suskind for the Children’s Institute featured talk “Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain,” which will take place on Wednesday, June 22, from 2:00 p.m. to 2:45 p.m. in the Magnolia-Jasmine Ballroom of the Wyndham Orlando Resort International. Learn more about Children’s Institute here.