Citing recent research showing that children’s brains benefit from continuous interaction with parents and caregivers from birth, Providence, Rhode Island is one of several cities embarking on an ambitious program to reduce the knowledge gap between low-income children and their more well-off peers.
Called Providence Talks, the program provides parents of low-income children with tiny recorders that capture every word a child hears. “The recorder acts as a tool for instructing…parents on how to turn even a visit to the kitchen into a language lesson,” the New York Times reported in March.
According to the article, many parents, especially among the poor and recent immigrants, are unaware of the value of talking, as well as reading and singing to, and playing with, their babies.
“In the same way that we say you should feed your child, brush their teeth, you should be stimulating their brain by talking, singing, and reading to them,” Ann O’Leary told the Times, whose Too Small to Fail program seeks to close the country’s “word gap.” According to the article, the program has focused on Latino children because more of them live in poverty than do children of any other racial or ethnic group.
