BabyTalk: Strengthen Your Child's Ability to Listen, Understand, and Communicate

Grownups don't like being corrected, scolded, or peppered with silly questions (or sillier requests), so why would babies? Yet babies get it in both ears, all day long: "No, no! Mustn't touch! Say 'apple', not 'apppppft!' What does the piggy say? Tell Mommy what the piggy says!"

Speech and language therapist Dr. Sally Ward concludes that not only do infants and toddlers dislike such talk, they can also suffer from too much of it--just as much as children who don't receive enough verbal stimulation. In the process of creating an intervention program to help kids with existing language problems, Ward and colleague Derdre Birkett also discovered that these BabyTalk techniques could actually prevent language problems from ever developing. The prescription: 30 minutes of your undivided attention a day, where baby's job is to explore and your job is to provide a quiet environment, age-appropriate commentary, game playing, and sensory stimuli.

Ward organizes her clinically supported recommendations by age group, starting with the birth-to-3-months crowd and concluding with 4-year-olds. Each chapter covers an age group's typical physical and mental development, as well as language recognition and use, listening ability, and attention span. As Ward goes on to detail appropriate playtime activities, she often reminds readers to avoid disruptive patterns of questioning, correcting, and scolding. Better to offer simple comments and lots of sound effects, and to repeat your baby's utterances, than to launch into wordy descriptions. Throughout the book, Ward expertly adds a documented study here, an anecdote there, to cinch her case for quality one-on-one time. Never stuffy and only slightly motherly (the author likes the phrase "your little child"), BabyTalk provides encouraging words and proven tools for building a solid learning foundation. --Liane Thomas