You’d be forgiven for thinking it was dreamt up by a Notting Hill yummy mummy. Talk to Your Baby is a national campaign that has just been launched by the National Literary Trust and it’s deadly serious. According to the campaign’s website, ‘Talking to young children helps them become good communicators, which is essential if they are to do well at school and lead happy, fulfilled and successful lives.’
It sounds absolutely barmy — the parenting equivalent of talking to plants — but in fact there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that talking to children under three has an almost magical effect on their cognitive development and transforms them into more intelligent adults.
A recent study by a group of Harvard economists, for instance, found that children who have had a good nursery education earn, on average, $20 per week more than their peers by the time they’re 27. That remains true even if you allow for all the usual factors: socio-economic status, good primary and secondary education, etc.
You only have to look at how well middle-class children do at school compared with children from low-income families to see just how important the formative years are. Two educationalists at the University of Durham have just published a book about academies and one of their findings is that the attainment of middle-class children doesn’t vary much according to what school they go to. They tend to do well even in poorly performing schools.
Common sense suggests it’s because their parents are more likely to take an interest in their education, but while that may be true, it’s pushiness during the very early years that makes the difference. Middle-class children are a year ahead of disadvantaged children by the age of five and they remain in front throughout their school careers.
Most educationalists believe the key factor is the breadth of vocabulary middle-class children are exposed to during the pre-school years. Leon Feinstein, a researcher in child development at the University of London, found that the size of a child’s vocabulary at 22 months is a reliable indicator of how well they’re likely to do at school. The class divide begins in the cradle.
I can add some anecdotal evidence of my own. When my daughter Sasha was around six months old I read her Pride and Prejudice. Sounds pretentious and it is, but that’s one of the advantages middle-class children enjoy over working-class children: their parents are willing to risk appearing pretentious if they believe their behaviour will secure their offspring a competitive advantage. And it worked. I have a video of Sasha scoring 100 out of 100 in a flash card test before her first birthday. By contrast, I read all three of her brothers Peepo and none of them started talking until they were two.
There are a wealth of examples from history, too. Take the letter the 19th-century biologist Francis Galton wrote to his cousin Adele in 1827: ‘I can read any English book. I can say all the Latin substantives, adjectives and active verbs, besides fifty-two lines of Latin poetry. I can cast up any sum in addition and multiply by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I read French a little and I know the clock.’ He was four years old at the time.
There’s no doubt about it — talking to your baby works. The question is: how can we persuade parents from low-income families to start doing it? I’m a big fan of the National Literacy Trust, but the problem with campaigns such as this is that only middle-class parents will sit up and take notice. If anything, it’s likely to increase the attainment gap between rich and poor since the rich are more likely to start talking to their babies as a result.
Nick Clegg has the right idea. He highlighted the vocabulary gap last week when announcing that the government would set aside £7 billion during the course of this parliament for the pupil premium. ‘Children from poor homes hear 616 words spoken an hour, on average, compared to 2,153 words an hour in richer homes,’ he said. ‘By the age of three, that amounts to a cumulative gap of 30 million words.’
His solution is to ensure that some of the £7 billion is spent on free nursery education for the very poorest children. That’s half right. All the evidence suggests that the most effective way to close the attainment gap would be to spend all of it on nursery education for the poor.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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