Parentese is the name for a way of interacting with babies that includes a higher vocal pitch, almost sing-song inflections, a slower pace, exaggerated facial expressions, and constant eye-contact with the infant.

Speaking Parentese with infants from the time they are born is essential for creating the architecture in their brains that is required for language and all subsequent learning, according to abundant neurological and other cognitive research carried out by The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard and the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.

Most middle and upper class parents instinctively break into Parentese as soon as their newborn infants begin cooing and reaching out.

Unfortunately, very few low-income moms and dads do the same.

Both Harvard and the University of Washington have successfully spread the word about Parentese within the early-education charitable foundation and academic universes.

What they haven’t yet done is persuasively get the Parentese message out to the millions of people in our country who need it most: the socioeconomically disadvantaged parents and caregivers who don’t speak Parentese with their newborns at all, much less as soon and often as is essential for optimal development of their language skills, learning abilities, and even emotional well-being.

Getting low-income parents to speak Parentese with their newborns is the key to enabling our chronic underclass to begin joining our productive middle class - and to thereby disrupting our country’s vicious circle of generational poverty.

BuildingBabiesBrains.Org is an evidence-based non-profit devoted to identifying and organizing a network of qualified organizations and individuals who will

- carry out the live, in person dialogues with low-income parents and parents-to-be that will ensure they take up the Parentese habit, and then

- deliver the follow-up face-to-face praise, guidance, encouragement, and other support that will ensure speaking Parentese with their infants is a behavior these parents won’t soon abandon.

Targeted organizations are ones that new and soon-to-be parents will naturally come in contact with prior to or soon after the birth of their children. For example

- Social workers at schools, child welfare and human service agencies, hospitals, mental health clinics

- Employees at ob/gyn practices

- Nurses at hospital maternity wards

- Clinicians and counselors at Planned Parenthood - an entity that would benefit greatly from its support of the positive, life-affirming BuildingBabiesBrains.org initiative

- Individual members of charitable service organizations (e.g. Rotary International, Kiwanis, Lions, the Optimists) who can converse with, provide literature to, and obtain contact info for the many target parents they encounter while in supermarkets and other public places

Utilizing the services of Early Head Start’s corps of Home Visitors would for the first time enable them to implement a program that - in stark contrast to what they are doing now - rigorous research has shown to have a significant and lasting impact on cognitive outcomes.

BuildingBabiesBrains.Org is now in the process of obtaining the support and endorsement of Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, and others prior to launching a major awareness creation campaign in early February.

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