 Every adult who's engaged with young children from birth and beyond becomes that child's conversational partner. We really need to work to make sure that our early childhood teachers understand what their role is with children. Children need to hear about 11 million words directed toward them from their parents. It's somebody who deeply matters to you, on whom you're counting, to share those words with you, to map onto your brain that vocabulary. Jack Shonkoff at Harvard describes it beautifully as serve and return. It's not closed-ended questions like, well, what color is your blouse? So serve and return starts with these questions like, who does that in the mirror? Oh, hello, lady. Are you coming over to visit me? That's a serve. And the baby will probably return with a smile or a kick. Yeah. Are you shaking your right now? But you can also verbally answer, well, that's you, Maxwell. What are you doing? So you start off before the child can talk, demonstrating the oral, the serve, and the return. The baby serve, when he starts cooling or crying or laughing, he needs to know or she needs to know that her voice is powerful and that you're going to pay attention to that voice. So parents can serve, children can serve. It's really important not to wait around for your child to serve. Once children go into an early childhood program, if I'm a parent and I'm holding my six-month-old and I walk into your center, I want to see whether you direct your language toward me or my baby. I'm certainly going to look on the changing table. Are you just changing the diaper and silence? Are you talking with the baby? Yeah. Oh, I see. You like that, don't you? I'd be looking for open-ended questions. Do they get serve and return? Yay. Oh, you want to dance now? Do you want to dance with your partner?