How talking to children can help them reach their full potential

Maybe you've seen those videos of children hearing for the first time, breaking into spontaneous, joyful grins, usually at the sound of their mother's voice.

It's impossible to keep your composure, filled as they are with such innocent, raw emotion.

Dana Suskind makes those moments happen. As a cochlear implant surgeon at the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital, she gives children the gift of sound. In one day she forever changes the trajectory of their lives in just about every way you can imagine - socially, emotionally, academically - opening to them a new world of language and relationships, pursuits and occupations.

But surgery is only the first step toward seizing that new world. During follow-up visits with some of her first patients, Suskind began noticing troubling disparities in the way different implant recipients were talking, reading and relating to language.

"The problems I saw bothered me tremendously," she writes in her new book, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain - Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns, released in September. "Lagging responses to hearing first sound, to responding to their names, slowness in saying a first word or reading a first book."

She discovered, through months of child development research and visits with her patients, that the differences all came down to parent talk. Children whose parents or primary caretaker spoke to them, sang to them, read to them, asked them frequent questions latched onto language and soared.