For Young Children, Talking is Teaching – how do new realities of social distancing and wearing face masks impact a child’s environment of quality relationships and language-rich interactions

The research is clear – talking is teaching. Parental responses to infant babbling can influence a child’s language development. Infants whose caregivers respond to what they think their babies are saying show an increase in advanced language sounds. However, research suggests by the time children are 2 years old, there is already a six-month gap in language understanding between children from higher-income and lower-income families, and by age four, the average child in a lower-income family might have 30 million fewer words of cumulative experience than the average child in a high-income family.

Such disparity remains apparent throughout the school years and is linked with later academic successes. Building from this research, more recent evidence has shown conversational turns to have more brain-building power than adult words alone, and without income as a predictor. Conversational turns are simple back-and-forth exchanges between a child and an adult, like in a game of tennis or ping pong. Children whose caregivers talk with them are more likely to use language with confidence and to grow larger vocabularies at younger ages. Such research provides an encouraging platform to empower parents and caregivers, especially those with limited resources, to realize how much they have the ability to benefit their child’s life by talking, reading and singing to them every day. But how do new realities of social distancing and wearing face masks impact a child’s environment of quality relationships and language-rich interactions?

Very young children learning how to use communication are especially impacted, and even more so are young children with hearing loss. A huge part of language development in infancy through preschool includes what is referred to as social referencing. Children gain a lot of information from a face that is laughing, fearful, angry or smiling. Young children whose caregivers are masked will miss some of these visual cues and possibly even have some trouble sorting out who goes with which voice when in groups. However, there are opportunities for caregivers to be creative and more intentional during their interactions, helping young children take full advantage of the visual information they receive.

Read the full story from University of Montana here.