Strollers and Talking

Baby strollers have become the latest bougie status symbol, but it's worth noting that one of the most important stroller features is almost always ignored. Here's VSL:

According to a new study, babies who sat in strollers that faced their parents during their daily walks had twice as many conversations, laughed ten times as much, and suffered less stress than babies who were in the more common, front-facing models.
The researchers studied 2,722 infants and found that kids who faced their parents had lower heart rates and fell asleep twice as easily as babies who faced forward. So along with generating laughter and baby talk, a face-time stroller will be far more likely to bring you that sweetest of sounds: the snore of your sleeping, soon-to-be-smarter offspring.

The importance of parent-child dialogue is confirmed by studies of childhood poverty. For instance, one study found that while "middle-class" parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" towards to their child per hour, homes with a parent on welfare averaged a mere 178 utterances per hour. This leads, over time, to dramatic differences in the vocabulary size of the child: at the age of 3, children whose parents are professionals have, on average, vocabularies of 1,100 words, while children whose parents are on welfare have vocabularies in the 500 word range. Over time, these differences in the size of vocabulary strongly correlate with IQ. (For more on this, be sure to check out Paul Tough's wonderful book Whatever It Takes.)

It would be nice to see this research filter down to stroller manufacturers, so that even cheap plastic strollers allow the infant to interact with the parent.

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Too bad their is no suburban equivalent. Since car seats cannot go in the front seat, children in cars therefore cannot face their parents.

babies who sat in strollers that faced their parents during their daily walks had twice as many conversations, laughed ten times as much, and suffered less stress than babies who were in the more common, front-facing models.

This makes sense ... but why wouldn't a soft front carrier be even more intimate and hence better on the same criteria?

That's what we used for both daughters, and we were so pleased with the results that we almost never used a stroller.

By Scott Belyea (not verified) on 02 Jan 2009 #permalink

And "baby slings" are better, i suppose, due to our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, because once we´d carried our toddlers with us and the sense of touch, the proximity, the balance... etc. caused good effects on baby development.

And "baby slings" are better, i suppose, due to our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, because once we�d carried our toddlers with us and the sense of touch, the proximity, the balance... etc. caused good effects on baby development.

I have no idea, and I suggested no such thing. All I said was that it worked for us.

By Scott Belyea (not verified) on 02 Jan 2009 #permalink

Fascinating post! I always assumed that babies would get bored and stultified looking back at their parents and not forwards towards the world and where they are headed.

Beware of causal inferences from observational studies like this.

Scott Belyea:
my comment was not in reference to yours, it was about the general content of Lehrer´s post. But i ratified myself in saying that baby slings could possibly be better to you and others for the reasons mentioned above.

Babies are far more likely to interact with their parents than with unfamiliar surroundings or strangers. I'm all for the "parent-facing" strollers.

Let us not forget that a great deal of the infantile population has gone the way of the Jimmy Choo shoes or the Anya Heinmarch bag...just another accessory. So when picking a stroller, of course the big question is whether the all terrrain, resin coated wheels are the correct width for the parental jogger. The poor baby needs a bug guard!

By Flanlgirl (not verified) on 04 Jan 2009 #permalink

I wonder if it increases or decreases the age in which children first can't stand the sight of their parents.

Or, perhaps 13 is a solid benchmark.