As a parent, it's important to recognize the impact that your words have on your child and take measures to ensure you're teaching the lessons you want your child to learn.

The way that parents talk to and around their children can have quite an impact on their emotional well-being as well as their behavior. In the first three years of life, your baby’s brains triples in size. It also becomes much more complex — and this doesn’t just happen without some help.Research shows that lots of talking with children in the first three years of life builds the brain architecture that will be needed later to support reading and thinking skills.

Parent talk, in fact, is the premise of LENA Start.

LENA Start is a program for parents that uses regular feedback from LENA technology to help increase interactive talk in order to close the early-talk gap, support kindergarten readiness and build stronger families. It fits in nicely with SCI’s Early Learning motto: Build a brain, build a life, build a community.

Starting in April through August, SCI is sponsoring two LENA Start sessions. One is at the West Florida Public Library; the other is at The Ministry Village Early Learning Center at Olive Baptist Church. Over the course of 13 weekly sessions, parents and caregivers learn about the importance of interactive talk along with ways to incorporate more conversation into their daily routines. As home language environments are transformed, communities are transformed, and an early-language focus builds to city-wide impact.

LENA is an acronym for Language Environmental Analysis. The LENA system measures how much and often parents and their children communicate. The data is used to generate a report that provides information on the number of words that the child was exposed to as well as the conversational turns  — the back and forth that occurs in the child’s language environment during the day.

The LENA System measures talk with children birth to three, a critical factor in early brain development. The power of talk is paramount in building babies’ brains. LENA Corp. was created based on research as far back as 1995 that has proven that the spoken language babies experience, especially in the first two to three years of life, help their brains develop. Studies show that talking more with babies is one of the most critical elements in their brain development. Most parents don’t know how much they’re talking to their babies. And almost all parents can do it more.

As reported in the TWYB (Talkwithyourbaby.org) website, some families are more talkative than others. “The parents, grandparents, and other caregivers talk with babies a lot, even before the baby can understand or answer — initiating facial expressions and sounds, giving a “play-by-play” when changing a diaper, telling stories, asking the baby questions, singing, talking about pictures in books, and telling the baby how wonderful he is she is.

“Other families don’t talk much with their babies. The parents may not understand how important it is to talk with very young children, or they may not have grown up with that experience, or they may have other things on their minds.

Research shows that children from talkative families may have heard 30 million more words directed to them by age 3 than children from less-talkative families. And the same research study showed that more words the children had heard by age 3, the better they did on tests of cognitive development. Baby talk can have tremendous benefits — including a boost in early language learning that becomes more apparent as babies age.

Smithsonian.com points to a study done by scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut. They collected thousands of 30-second conversations between parents and their babies, fitting 26 kids with audio-recording vests that captured language and sound during a typical eight-hour day. The scientists then used analysis software to quantify how much the parents used baby talk during more than 4,000 encounters.

This Developmental Science study found that the more baby talk parents used, the more their youngsters began to babble. All that babbling produced some surprising results at older ages. When researchers checked in with the same babies at age two, they found that frequent baby talk had dramatically boosted vocabulary regardless of socioeconomic status. 

Two-year-olds who had heard the most baby talk knew an average of 433 words, while those whose families had been the quietest knew an average of 169 words. Similar research and results came from a Studer Community Institute partnership with the LENA Research Foundation to offer LENA Start to parents in Pensacola. 

LENA Start is dedicated to increasing talk in the first three years of a child’s life when a child’s brain develops to 80 percent of its adult size. During this critical window, children from low-income families may hear as many as 30 million fewer do matter and providing parents with tips and tools to increase the words they use words than their more affluent peers.

Words with their children matters even more to us. Parents have the power to literally change the course of their child’s life early by simply using the tool of conversation. At SCI, we offer parents simple and easy steps to help their babies develop healthy, strong and powerful brains through power of words. Simply talking to your baby early and often has the power to change your baby’s life and the future of her success in school and in life.