Note: I originally wrote and posted this article on LinkedIn.
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Key point: 30,000 caregiver words per day in the first three years of life cost no more than 5,000 words per day but has a profound impact for our society. Shouldn't this be of primary interest to our public health organizations, philanthropists and entrepreneurs?
Responsible sectors could:
· Philanthropic: Distribute easy to understand material that explains the significance of 30,000 words per day and gives benchmarks for reaching the goal
· Public-Private Partnerships: Publicize the topic through all forms of media and community programs.
· Entrepreneurial: Make it measurable in every home with affordable consumer products and technology (technology companies, publishers and toy manufacturers)
Market size:
· 130,000,000 worldwide births per year
· 5,200,000 EU births per year
· 3,900,000 US births per year
· 11,000,000 US children under age three
At the start of summer a young girl persuades her mother to purchase a tomato plant. Not a challenging task considering her mother’s favorite summer dish. The plant is brought home placed in a sunny location and watered. Soon the plant will bear enough juicy sweet tomatoes for a summer’s worth of Caprese salads…or will it? The family heads to the beach for the weekend. When they return their once flowering plant has withered. They give it water, lots of water, the plant slowly comes back to life but produces only two small fruits for the season. Sadly, Mother Nature isn’t sympathetic to tough beginnings.
Twenty-one months ago, my wife gave birth to our beautiful baby girl Adeline! The world immediately changed in ways unimaginable. I found myself thirsting for enlightenment on child development and specifically searching for those parenting practices that can have a major impact on cognitive processes. Plenty of love and care, vitamin D, choline, DHA, early exposer to complex music, communication plus some more all made the list. But when Brenda Fitzgerald’s TEDx Talk led me to “The Early Catastrophe” by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley three important things happened. Firstly, the awareness of how critical verbal “interaction between baby and caregiver” during the first three years is to lifelong achievement scared the hell out of me. This research shows that verbal engagement from birth to age three is enough to explain the academic gap between children born in low versus high income families. Secondly, the mere fact that a proven yard stick of 30,000 words per day exists eased that fear and changed my behavior. This simple idea of having an actual number to target is so powerful it could change our entire society. I started estimating the word count of all my daughter’s books and paying close attention to time elapsing between verbal communication. Thirdly, the entrepreneurial wheels started turning. How could something so basic and well documented with such potentially enormous benefits to society still be in the shadows? Wouldn’t tackling this issue march the great foundations of the world closer to accomplishing their goals for equality as much as spending on primary and secondary education does? Would not other academic initiatives bear more fruit if the bell curve was shifted forward rather than struggling with a median that is the result of intrinsic limitations largely set by our third birthdays? In other words, this research needs to be in everyday practice it needs to be distributed it needs to be ubiquitous. Where are the entrepreneurs on this? We are the ones that are supposed to pick up the challenge here.
Grassroots efforts are being made. Dr. Dana Suskind published Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain in 2015 and has started an initiative focused on direct intervention with families in the Chicago metropolitan area. Brenda Fitzgerald is working with the United Way on similar work in Atlanta and bloggers are blogging. This is how ideas are born but it’s the nature of academic research to be most impactful by transferring knowledge to business. The best parts need to be made scalable for mass market. 30,000 words is not a drug it is not even a therapy it does not require years of clinical trials. We should all be jumping up and down with excitement about this. Here’s a solution to a problem that if it were a drug would justify large scale investment. Making parents aware that this is measurable is the key. It’s a giant leap from being told to talk with your kid to knowing that 30,000 words a day is a standard that can change their future. It is so much more empowering to have a standard to shoot for.
Now, are we motivated to do something, make a product, start a business? All the complicated videos and specialty materials found with other educational products is not at issue here. This is low risk high reward territory. Get people talking and reading to their babies more by giving them a target and expected result! Gamify it! Can you reach out to influencers, journalists, bloggers and philanthropists with the resources to dig into the opportunity? Can a project be crowdfunded? Can apps be made? Do you know a decision maker at a toy company, publisher, book store chain? Do investors want to put brainstorming sessions together? This could be a movement that benefits from the type of awareness that comes from competing products. Got a product concept try a TOMS Shoe model of giving one away for everyone sold? It’s the low-income segment of society that needs this the most but what a long-term impact it has for everyone’s future.
A few open domain ideas (if caregivers can track effort they will get results):
· Create a two-teared bookshelf with book set that has a “word ruler” along the edge. As a book is completed it is moved from bottom shelf to top. The space taken up by the books gauges word count. Hi-tech variant on this would be to RFID a book collection with word count data. Read a book put it through a slot in the book basket and know how many words have been read. (Could this be crowdfunded?)
· Start the “30,000 words” label campaign for the front of books. Put a message in the front of the book that explains the concept. Indicate word count on the front of the book. (Could be great marketing for a publisher)
· Create a smart phone app that allows parents to keep track of estimated word counts (reading plus talk, passive TV doesn’t count) for each day.
· Write an Alexa program that can estimate verbal interaction.
· Wearable device, home fixture, child’s toy or connected set of devices that can distinguish human talk from TV to monitor daily word count.
· Daily newsletter with suggested reading material and activities for getting to 30,000. Make it a book club.
Hope your wheels are turning too,
Gabe