Free The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier by Susan Pinker

straight. Use your napkin. Chew with your mouth closed
. Or they didn’t talk to them at all at mealtime because meals were silent, serious affairs. Or because there were no mealtimes.
    For most of these families, mealtime meant sitting together for anywhere between two and forty-seven minutes. The average was about twenty minutes. Most often it was the mother who sat with the children. Fathers were present for only a third of the dinners, and “even when present contributed relatively little to the conversations,” write the researchers. So here the female effect is by default, though as we shall see, mothers exert extraordinary influence even when both parents are present. One meal consisted of two children eating cereal alone in front of the TV, while another meal was a recording of a mother and son baking cornbread. As there were only the two of them at home, there was no point to real dinners, the mother explained to the researchers.
    That’s understandable, but it’s also a pity. Family meals trump almost every other activity—including reading books and playing with toys—when it comes to jumpstarting a child’s vocabulary, according to a 2001 study. 34 More recently, in an astounding naturalistic experiment called the Human Speechome Project, MIT computer scientist Deb Roy and his wife, Northeastern University psycholinguist Rupal Patel, installed eleven omnidirectional fisheye cameras and fourteen high-performance microphones in the ceilings of their suburban Boston bungalow a few months beforetheir first child was born. They have since recorded more than 250,000 hours of audio and video—nearly every waking moment of their son’s first three years. The point was to capture the uniquely social aspect of human language acquisition right where most babies learn to talk—at home. It will likely take decades to parse the two gigabytes of data recorded every day the pilot project was running. But a preliminary peek shows that there are social hotspots where much of the action happens. These hotspots are also where most of the baby’s “word births” take place, according to Roy, and one of the hottest of those spots is the kitchen. 35
    A parent’s banter with her toddler over the mashed potatoes turns out to be a pretty good predictor of that child’s vocabulary level a few years later, notwithstanding how high the child’s IQ might be, how educated the parents are, or how much they earn. 36 Though Roy has found a strong link between how often a parent says a word and how early the child utters it, it’s not just about the number of words the child produces. 37 Face-to-face conversations can prompt empathy too, through reading people’s facial expressions and engaging in back-and-forth dialogue about “counterfactuals,” which developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik defines as thinking about “what might have happened, but didn’t—the woulda-coulda-shouldas of life.” 38
    It might be mind-numbingly boring to play out a hypothetical scenario involving fictional monsters over and over and over again with a toddler. But parents need to consider this: “By the time they are two or three, children quite characteristically spend much of their waking hours in a world of imaginary creatures, possible universes, and assumed identities,” Gopnik writes in
The Philosophical Baby
. Imagining these what-if worlds and understanding how the real one works are more tightly connected than you think, she asserts, providing mountains of evidence from her Berkeley lab. Apparently, if they are to develop enhanced vocabulary and communication skills, kids need unstructured social time when they’renot being drilled on number concepts with the help of Brainy Baby videos. There is even evidence that babies who spend time in front of such instructional DVDs have significantly
lower
vocabulary levels compared to babies who interact with people. 39 If developing empathy hinges on maintaining close contact—“the kind