The Frontal Cortex

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.