Bob Keeshan Quotes

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

Parents should talk to their children, even when they are babies and can't talk back.

Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did.

The level of communication you can achieve with an infant is really profound.

By four years of age, the average child in a family receiving public assistance has heard about 13 million words, compared to 45 million for a child from a wealthier family. The disadvantages developed during their first four years are usually still present in high school.

One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.

When kids are young, before the age of ten, there is a critical window of opportunity when their habits and motivations can be influenced.

Girls enjoy complex social interaction. Their verbal skills - and their delight in using them - develop earlier than boys'.

Many people must have noticed the intense attention given by children to the conversation of grown-ups when they cannot possibly be understanding a word of what they hear. They are trying to get hold of words, and they often demonstrate this fact by repeating joyously some word which they have been able to grasp.

When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations. This is the age in which language and movement develop. The child must be safeguarded in order that these activities may develop freely.

Kids are generally rotten until the age of about six, when they become people.

Both the quantity and quality of the words children hear during their first three years of life make an enormous difference in how prepared they are to start school, and ultimately, their long-term achievement.

Reading to babies creates such a special parent-child bond and so strongly influences a child's language skills that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that doctors and nurses routinely discuss it with parents during pediatric visits.

Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk.

In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.

Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.

One of the best investments we can make is to give our kids the ingredients they need to develop in the first five years of life.

When kids are really little, they all look the same. No speech, no social relatedness, cannot emphasize enough the importance of early educational intervention.

Most people understand that the more words children are exposed to, the stronger their vocabularies will be. But fewer people are aware that the quality of the words also significantly affects brain development.

When I was little, seven or eight years old, in third and fourth grade, I would always try to use long words and stuff.

I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.

Children who play regularly with their peers are most likely to achieve the highest levels of adjustment as adults.

Everything you worry about as a parent can be improved by sitting down regularly with your kids.

Kids grasp what you teach them, from crawling to walking, for everything they look up to their parents.