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TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-06-03
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8qc8Aa3weE
thank you very much there is a profound predictor that helps and wealth that can be determined by three years of age and that predictor is a language language is the essence of what it means to be human now animals may have noises or gestures that they could communicate with I can assure you my cat can get me out of the bed at five o'clock in the
morning because he's on right bullshit human beings are much more adapted much more fast silent language I can tell you that playing wage in the Oxford unabridged English dictionary there six hundred thousand different words that American that English people can know lots of people spoke speak more than one language so the ability of humans is enormous you never really and truly see a chimpanzee or a
rhinoceros reading a book but humans commonly read books and we understand the language babies come into this world shoot Lee program to learn all these different words to learn the essence of language because language is what makes us human him quite frankly language is what makes a survive there's a huge growth spurt a huge increase in capacity in the brain by at least a third that
occurs in that last part of pregnancy right before babies come into this world and I can tell you that babies are hard wired to learn different languages I can tell you that because the important thing about babies is not only that there's the capacity but how we learn language is from our caretakers that means mothers and babies have this unique experience I can tell you from
the paternal point of view that I experienced that in my own life now I'm an obstetrician gynecologist I delivered lots and lots and lots of babies but the experience of delivering somebody else's baby was completely different than my own pregnancy now I can tell you I came to pregnancy and I was already a doctor I'd known I'd wanted to be a doctor from age eight I
loved it I was a really good sergeant I wasn't really even sure I wanted children and then this pregnancy occurred by choice and all of a sudden I was acutely aware of my unborn daughter all of a sudden this woman that had been interested in the outside world was only concentrated on my pregnant belly I wasn't really interested in anything more than ten feet away from
me the evidence of hard wire is even more profound in babies what you're looking at is the development of language because the language is the interaction between caretaker and baby this experiment from the Harvard child development center is about the importance and the hard wired that is existing this is called the still face experiment what happened is the mothers are instructed to turn away and then
turned back to the child and have a still face watch what happens to the baby questions see happening is first she tries to engage smile news points that's right that's solicitor response points and then she Coos and then she reaches out this is important this is hardwired and all of a sudden she starts to get frustrated nothingness kitchenette kitchen there's a script tries to comfort herself
and then she looks away trust to disengage picks one fatal one more attempt to get her mother's attention and then she dissolves the hope was crying it's hard water the still face experience experiments are clear in our clear indicators that this is hard wire so what's the importance what's the long term consequence of this kind of biologics why is it important that a mother concentrates on
her baby or the baby concentrated demands the attention of its mother the long term effect of all this primitive stuff was done in some I think some kind of brilliant work but hard in recently and they were experimenters who %HESITATION had been involved in the war on poverty they've been involved in the war on poverty and they said you know there's a problem here because we
are not really seen with these early educational interventions although they're good although there some results we are really not seeing what we wanted to see so they said can we do occurred earlier is there something that's happening before these babies get to kindergarten before these babies get to first grade is there something happening that's important and their work was an extreme involved deep observation a family
life they went into the homes of forty two families and they had enough tickets observation of those families they looked at those families an hour a month every single month from the time their children were seven months of age until the end of the third year and what they found as by the taught by the the title of my talk was not really what they expected
first of all the children were all well cared for so it wasn't the changes in the children the difference in the children had nothing to do with not with not having the physical needs met secondly it was not about race it was not about gender and here's the key it was not about money it wasn't determined by the number of toys that could be purchased by
the parent it wasn't determined by the neighborhood I lived in it wasn't determined by the size of the house they lived in it was determined by the interaction of the parents with the child and the interaction that they saw after three years of observation was that there were thirty million more words that those families there were identified as professional families thirty million more words at those
families those Mamas and Daddies said to their children then the children in poverty the reality is for those families in poverty does parents were only say in about six hundred words in our for the professional families it was over two thousand words in our because a professional families were having constant talking with their baby all your diaper needs to be changed all pressure heart hurt take
care of that all we look at those tolls those toes wonderful and look at that belly button that is the cutest thing I've ever seen you are my beloved child thirty million more words that's important because neurologic development of the brain actual physical development of the brain depends on words each time a word is said it shoots up the neurons it stimulates the neurons in when
that word is repeated that same path is stimulated again and you get stronger and stronger and stronger and that branches out so there's capability of learning and if those words are not repeated opposite occurs those neurons shriek and die and go away the scientific words pruning but what it means is it decreases the ability to learn and now I've got to tell you one more thing
it's not it's not just hearing the words because babies put in front of televisions it's like the still face experiment they don't learn they don't learn because it's the inner action and children who are deaf can learn language thank you in sign language is the language hits symbols that mean something its language so it's not the hearing but it's the inner action that is most important
and it is enormously important this is a graph of the effect of those thirty million different words on these children at the end of three years those babies that were born to welfare parents new five hundred words while those babies in the quote professional families new over a thousand words it makes a difference this whole process his language nutrition and what it means says that language
is absolutely important for the development of the brain both languages absolutely the basis from which all human learning occurs if you think about it what language nutrition really is is the development of neurons the development of the brain if absolutely a biologically dependent on language which leads directly to the ability to read which leads directly to graduate from high school which leads directly to college education
or high school education the importance of learning to read the importance of this language nutrition is that there were profound effects that they observed that were long term it wasn't just short term it was long term they looked at the same children five years later and they found that they could tell that the gap had increased between those three between those children have gone from five
hundred to a thousand words to the ability to pass standardized tests third grade and why was that bitch mark so important third grade is important in the whole part of human learning because up to third grade you learn to read after third grade you read to learn if you cannot read on level by third grade you can't read the tax so you can't keep up you
may never catch up for those children who are not reading on level by third grade there are four times more likely not to be able to graduate from high school and remember this language attrition model if they can't read they don't graduate from high school and that leads directly to a problem with success in society if you're really behind in reading there's a six times greater
chance it you won't graduate from high school now the problem in Georgia is that seventy percent of Georgia's children do not read on third grade level seventy percent that has profound implications for the state and profound implications for the individuals that are involved there's this ranking called Americans national health rankings and in those health rankings there two clusters that keep me up at night two clusters
at his essay help officer I worry about one cluster is about infant mortality and free maturity and all that and we've made some progress there and back to talk for another day the other cluster where there were the very bottom of the pack for in the lowest ten in the country has to do with this whole business about literacy third grade we have high numbers of
children in poverty five numbers of failure to graduate from high school high numbers of income disparity lack of health insurance under employment unemployment all of this because of our lack of ability to read on level at third grade also as a state health officer I can tell you that is unacceptable it is on expect bull especially since I know it's not the neighborhood it's not the
income it's not the genetics he exposure to language early exposure to language so were involved in a public private partnership call talk with me baby and this is to solve this problem that we have here in Georgia this is a public private partnership it involves United Way involves the any Casey foundation involves public health hidden Bob's apartment early chair and all child care and learning but
all of it is the same all of it is to change this paradigm for example the Marcus foundation which is one of our partners they're involved in developing the tools to teach health care providers to teach nurses and hospitals and doctors how to tell their patients about this importance of early learning and also how to tell their patients how to do it in public health we're
going directly to the Mamas because in public health we have an interesting little program called wick wiki is the women and infant and child nutrition program now week is different from a regular food stamp program in wake you don't just get a little plastic card and go to the grocery store new whatever you want in whit you have to come to see us every three months
to see a nutritionist and you could only purchase certain foods with your wit card we see this as a unique opportunity to take food nutrition which is so important for our citizens of the state talk to them about language nutrition and there are a lot of people in wick fifty to sixty percent of Georgia's babies qualify in our in wake fifty six percent fifty to sixty
percent and all those low risk mothers and with this everywhere there a hundred fifty nine counties in Georgia and we have a hundred and fifty nine or more we call offices in Georgia we have a wick office capable of reaching the speech paper these people every single place in Georgia there's not a single place in Georgia you can't get to work office we hired the Marcus
foundation to come up with some videos and these videos will be played in the what clinics and they'll tell these young mothers these young needy mothers these poverty mothers who were going back to the original studies about the importance of food nutrition they'll tell these mothers how to do it because it's not just straight for now talk to your baby you'll be fine there are subtleties
that you need to know and these videos are and designed to do that it'll tell them such things as a baby is born recognizing its mother's voice therefore when you start talking your baby he swing your baby is still in the womb so this program is designed to get to all these mothers so far what we've done is we want to know what works have happily
to work before we want to know is does this really work so we have a value weighted average number of words did the children are wick clinic no and we're going to start the videos and we're going to couple it with the reinforcement member those every three months visits for pregnant women and children we're gonna reinforce that with the nutrition saying to them food nutrition is
important but language nutrition maybe even more important for your baby and when that mamma goes home from the what clinic she's going to be taking a book I really think that this will change the dynamics here in Georgia I know for a fact that it is all about language the most important concept is the development of language I know that the office of the budget for
the house of representatives recently did a study and they looked at the evaluation of the war on poverty that was started back in the sixties and according to author budget office we spent five trillion dollars on it and here's what happened the poverty rate in nineteen sixty five when it started the poverty rate was seventeen point three in two thousand twelve after five trillion dollars it
is fifteen that's not much progress I present to you I think the problem is we didn't look pretty answer to the problem early enough and we didn't we weren't including language we have to include links languages the very basis solving the problem of poverty life expectancy at the time of Christ twenty to thirty years life expectancy for human beings a thousand years later twenty to thirty
years today you people sitting out there your life expectancy is eighty years or more you survived birth you survive learning to drive as a teenager and you have a great chance of living to eighty year more that expected change in life expectancy is not because the by pass surgery or cat scans bypass surgery cat scans are great they may have a year or two but those
transformational changes are from more basic primary primitive public health initiatives those changes in life expectancy are from clean water and effective sewer and vaccinations and the development of antibiotics I can tell you that in nineteen hundred the things that were killing us a threesome killers of human beings in nineteen hundred was pneumonia T. B. and diarrhea and I can also tell you that the things I
mentioned clean water sewers vaccinations antibiotics those are responsible for the expected change in life I can also say to you that I believe that we are on the precipice of the next transformational strange in public health that transformational change I truly believe is the deep understanding of the importance of language development and the determination that we have absolutely universal effective early language development my message to
