7 Quotes by Dana Suskind

In Professor Dweck’s study, 128 fifth graders were given a puzzle to complete. After finishing, some children were praised for being smart, others for working hard. The children were then given the choice of a second task, one more difficult, but from which they “would learn a lot,” or one similar to the first. Sixty-seven percent of the kids called “smart” chose the easy task; 92 percent of those praised for working hard chose the more difficult task.

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.

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.

Just like hearing newborns, newly implanted children must spend about a year soaking in, and learning to understand, the sounds in their world.

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.

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.

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.