Does Talking to Your Newborn Feel Like Talking to a Houseplant?

I remember the night we came home from the hospital with my first daughter Olivia. My wife Pam and I did not sleep the entire night. Part of it was because we had a newborn and all of the usual challenges that come with it, but much of it was that we had no idea what we were doing and believed that if we took our eyes off of her in the middle of the night that something terrible would happen and she’d never wake up.

Fast forward three years and I just came home from the hospital with my second daughter, Caroline. Her big sister Olivia was a great baby, and so far Caroline is even better. Either that or they’re mostly the same, but Pam and I are far less stressed this time around. Still, I expect I’ll regularly be up in the middle of the night with Caroline for at least the next month or two.

I started and led an education organization where we trained tens of thousands of adults. I then went back to school at Stanford and spent my entire there trying to figure out how to “fix” our education system. After going through the experience of teaching some challenged adult populations, I wondered how those folks would have fared if they had just gotten a great education in high school. Not long after, I realized that challenged high school kids missed out on a great education in elementary and middle school.

Eventually, I concluded that our trajectories in life are largely set by the time we entered kindergarten.

I also learned that there was something really simple that I could do to affect my kids’ trajectory: talk to them. A wealth of research over the past two decades shows the number of words a child hears between the birth and three years of age is a powerful predictor of her future academic and emotional success.

Words represent so much. Talking to our kids teaches them the communication medium through which they’ll learn everything else in their lives. Reading stories, playing games, and having dinner as a family all involve words. The sooner they learn words, the sooner they can learn other things at precisely the time in their lives when they are also most able to absorb new information.

As a parent of a newborn and a three year old, I’m captivated by the elegance and simplicity of this “fix” to our education system.

Still, when it’s 3AM and I’m feeding baby Caroline a bottle, the last thing I want to do is utter a single word. Most of my mental energy is focused on staying awake and whatever is leftover is used to calculate an ever-updating tally of how much sleep I might get that night if I went back to bed at that very moment. Also, talking to a newborn in a quiet house in the middle of the night kind of feels like I’ve taken up talking to houseplants or the voices in my head.

Fortunately, Caroline eats everyday at 3AM, so after failing a few times I came up with a simple solution that would make any millennial proud. It involves multi-tasking, an iPhone, current events and some names that are really difficult to say out loud.

Here’s the trick: I hold Caroline in my left arm and have my iPhone in my left hand sticking out so I can see it from underneath her tiny body. In my right hand I hold her bottle in her mouth. While holding and feeding I use my phone and open up the newspaper and start reading. Sure, it’s no children’s book, but my captive little audience doesn’t seem to mind one bit hearing about the latest problems in the Middle East or that Republicans and Democrats apparently don’t like each other.

I’m pretty happy with our current arrangement because it helps me stay awake while I help expose Caroline to a large number of interesting words. More importantly, I do not have to think of what to say. It really takes way less mental energy to read something written by someone else than to spontaneously come up with stuff on my own in the dark of the night. Caroline has no idea what I’m saying just yet, but I know she’s listening, and all babies have to start somewhere. Soon she’ll start to understand the words and not long after she’ll start to speak herself, and I intend to help her along one news story at a time.

This piece was originally posted at VersaMe.com. VersaMe created the Starling the world’s first wearable engagement tracker that helps encourage and reinforce positive parenting behaviors.