Baby building blocks: Parents set kids on their path

On the first day of kindergarten, a child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size. Much of who that child will grow up to be already has been decided, neurologically speaking, making the earliest years the pivot point for the lifetime that follows.

What parents need to know, need to do, in those years, what will have the greatest impact for their child’s entire life, is talk, experts say.

Jibberjabber chats with toddlers. Cooing with babies. Sharing smiles. Waiting for an answer. Answering with a question. Wanting to get into that pint-size head to hear what’s clicking behind those fast-darting eyes.

“It’s the exchange that matters, talking to each other,” said Rosa Barragan, head of child care resource and referral for Merced County. “Serve and return,” is the clinical phrase for the type of talking with children that for too many families has become a lost art.

The Multnomah County Library in Portland, Ore., offers tips on building literacy skills from the earliest days. They kick off with these words: “Right from the start, babies need us. They need us to feed them, keep them warm, and most importantly, they need us to bond with them – to be ‘crazy about them.’”

The library’s advice: Do five things with your child every day – Read, talk, sing, write and play.

Read to instill a love of books; talk to expand vocabulary; sing to expand the range of sounds (and keep arguments at bay on long car rides); write to work on motor skills and letter recognition (and make all the best gifts for grandparents); play to encourage observation and prediction (and those gracious loser skills).

“Children are like sponges. They pick it up so fast,” said Carmen Alvarez, a longtime Head Start teacher with the Stanislaus County Office of Education. “Make questions open-ended. Have them tell you what they did, and the why, and the how,” she suggested.

Alvarez uses redirection instead of timeouts. “‘You were having a hard time over there. Let’s try this.’ You take them out of the zone of ‘I’m being bad.’” she said.

Ideally, reading before bedtime becomes a steady go-to-sleep routine, a rush to hit the bed to hear the next chapter. But make those paper pages flipping, because clicking a Kindle does not have all the same benefits, research shows. The language, however, does not matter.

“We know that parents who speak with their children and read to their children in Spanish, those kids have good outcomes. It’s about engagement,” said Marian Kaanon of the Stanislaus Community Foundation.

The foundation has taken point on a countywide effort to have more children reading well in third grade, a key indicator of future success. As a first step, the Stanislaus Reads initiative hopes to improve kindergarten readiness.

That readiness goes beyond knowing letters, numbers and colors. Kids need to be able to sit quietly in a group for short periods, line up without roughhousing and know how to ask for help without tantrums.

Yet only about a third of Stanislaus County 3- and 4-year-olds attend preschool, where kids practice those skills.

“The research is clear that every dollar investing in high-quality early care and education yields a tremendous return in savings on special education, the criminal justice system and public assistance,” notes Stanislaus County Superintendent of Schools Tom Changnon.

Changnon’s office oversees a $55 million budget to serve primarily low-income 0- to 5-year-olds and their families, including Head Start programs for nearly 1,800 youngsters and state preschool serving about 2,000.

Low-income children, who make up 66 percent of school-age children in Stanislaus County and 80 percent of Merced County schoolkids, have heard 30 million fewer words at age 3 than their better-off counterparts – not enough talking.

Here’s another telling statistic: 61 percent of low-income homes have not one children’s book in them.

This story was originally published March 26, 2015 at 10:40 AM with the headline "Baby building blocks: Parents set kids on their path."