Thirty Million Words Quotes

“Parent talk is probably the most valuable resource in our world. No matter the language, the culture, the nuances of vocabulary, or the socioeconomic status, language is the element that helps develop the brain to its optimum potential. In the same way, the lack of language is the enemy of brain development.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“In one hour, the highest SES children heard an average of two thousand words, while children of welfare families heard about six hundred. Differences in parental responses to children were also striking. Highest SES parents responded to their children about 250 times per hour; lowest SES parents responded to their children fewer than 50 times in the same period. But the most significant and most concerning difference? Verbal approval. Children in the highest SES heard about forty expressions of verbal approval per hour. Children in welfare homes, about four.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Instead of instilling a sense of the absolutes in abilities, says Professor Dweck, what we as parents and educators must engender is the sense that effort is the pivotal factor in achievement, that giving up, not a lack of ability, is usually the cause of failure.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“We are products of our expectations,”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Imagine the brain as a piggy bank. If all you stick in are pennies, even a filled piggy bank won’t do much toward paying tuition for college, let alone medical school. In the same way, if the only words you put into a baby’s brain are three-for-a-penny words, there won’t be much to put toward college tuition, either.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“The development of that brain, science shows us, is absolutely related to the language environment of the young child. This does not mean that the brain stops developing after three years, but it does emphasize those years as critical. In fact, the diagnosis of hearing loss in babies had often been called a “neurologic emergency,” essentially because of the expected negative impact on a newborn’s development.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Just as seeds have the potential of becoming roses or petunias or hydrangeas, the ultimate beauty and strength of each flower is dependent on the nurturing it gets.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“by simply praising innate abilities: “You are really good in math.” “Math just comes naturally to you.” In that way, we transmit the idea that math is a fixed ability, a “gift” you are either born with or not. Conveying that eliminates the critical importance of perseverance, devotion, and hard work. It implies that when you can’t do something easily, you just aren’t smart enough, no sense in trying.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“effort is the pivotal factor in achievement, that giving up, not a lack of ability, is usually the cause of failure.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“child’s genetics, its blueprint for potential, the gifts handed down by birth, are not, in fact, set in stone.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“A baby’s brain is a result of that evolutionary history. It does not learn language passively, but only in an environment of social responsiveness and social interaction. The importance of the linguistic serve-and-return in the baby-caretaker relationship is a key factor in learning language and in learning; its importance cannot be emphasized enough.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Just like hearing newborns, newly implanted children must spend about a year soaking in, and learning to understand, the sounds in their world.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“The cochlear implant, as incredible as it is, is not the missing puzzle piece. Rather, it is simply a conduit, a pathway for the essential puzzle piece, the miraculous power of parent talk, a power that is the same, whether a child is born hearing or has acquired hearing via a cochlear implant. Without that language environment, the ability to hear is a wasted gift. Without that language environment, a child will be unlikely to achieve optimally.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Now I look at the adults who care for them and think, “You are more powerful than you ever imagined and I hope you know it.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“self-regulation in children is enhanced when parents support their children’s control of their own behavior, when they explain reasons for rules, and when they provide non-emotional reasons for discipline.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“If praise is not handled properly,” Carol Dweck has said, “it can become a negative force, a kind of drug that, rather than strengthening students, makes them passive and dependent on the opinion of others.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Words, as we know from their impact on self-image, also impact skills. When your self-image is as a math “nonperformer” and you’re challenged to learn a math skill, your brain uses up your intellectual energy by arguing with you that you really can’t do it, a kind of mental barricade on the road to accomplishment. You may inherently have the ability to learn it, but that ability is eroded by the roiling doubts that wear it away.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“the genetic potentials we’ve been awarded by the chance of parentage can be mitigated, destroyed, or achieved by our second round of luck, the parental language environment we experience as children.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Referring to the number of words a parent speaks to a child and the way in which a parent speaks to a child, parent language influences our ability to reach our potentials in math, spatial reasoning, and literacy, our ability to regulate our behavior, our reaction to stress, our perseverance and even our moral fiber. It is also an essential catalyst in determining the strength and permanence of certain neuronal wirings and the pruning away of others.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“That interconnected wiring is called the connectome. And that connectome, the ten thousand connections per neuron linking the one hundred billion neurons in each of our brains, is what makes us who we are, including how we think and how we behave.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Neuroscience is like an intriguing mystery novel with sharp-brained detectives, who happen to have PhDs, ferreting out clues that will finally let us know, on the last page, why we are the way we are.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“caregiver’s language is the essential resource of every country, every culture, every person, extending into every crevice of who we are, what we can do, and how we behave.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Imaging of babies’ brains shows that even before they say their first words, they are mentally practicing responding, trying to figure out how to create the motor movements necessary to articulate the words of their language.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“language, during the first three years, in addition to helping build vocabulary and conversational skills, helps provide a foundation for social, emotional, and cognitive development.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“From birth through about three years of age, each second represents the creation, by the brain, of seven hundred to one thousand additional neuronal connections.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“In the end, quantity of words is important, but only as an adjunct to the loving, nurturing relationship that is determined by a baby’s caretaker. There may be many words, but their positive effect on the brain is dependent on responsiveness and warmth.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“optimum brain development is language dependent. The words we hear, how many we hear, and how they are said are determining factors in its development.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“The essential factor that determined the future learning trajectory of a child was the early language environment: how much and how a parent talked to a child. Children in homes in which there was a lot of parent talk, no matter the educational or economic status of that home, did better. It was as simple as that.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“A rich language environment “is like oxygen. It’s easy to take for granted until you see someone who isn’t getting enough.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. —attributed to Margaret Mead”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain