Today Date Triggered Content

First smiles, first babbles, first words... they’re all exciting milestones because you get to see your baby or child communicate. You know that those early smiles, coos and babbles are times of connection and so won’t be surprised that learning to talk is about much more than first words.  

We’ve put a round up of all our articles about talk and communication at the bottom of your Today screen. We’ll leave them there for a while, so you have lots of time to read them. And we thought for this weekend’s play ideas, we’d focus on supporting your little one’s communication.  

You probably find lots of people share their opinions about your child’s development – and if you hear something a few times you might wonder if it’s true. One of the things we’ve heard many times is that girls learn to talk sooner than boys, so when we saw a research paper reviewing this we thought we’d dive in and find out more.

In this paper, scientists from the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome looked at research that had considered the development of language in boys and girls – looking at if, how and why this differed.^[1]  

"Reading and writing float on a sea of talk.”
-- James Britton, educator and researcher 

Anyone who was pregnant or gave birth during lockdown knows it was a different and sometimes difficult experience. There have been various headlines since then about the impact of lockdown on children’s development, as if you need something else to feel guilty about. We noticed another at the weekend, but what has it really found? 

At the weekend we saw this headline – ‘Children born in pandemic have poorer communication skills, study finds’.^[1]

Well, strictly speaking, not very much actually. But there is one phrase that’s important for both a successful game of tennis and developing children’s social, cognitive and communication skills – ‘serve and return’. 

Just like in tennis, when we talk about serve and return interactions in child development we are talking about two people passing something back and forth – and paying attention to make sure it keeps moving for as long as possible.