Boost Your Child’s IQ Score Through Storytelling

Believe it or not, spinning yarns to your little ones can actually help boost their IQs! In one of the most interesting research studies of the past 15 years, child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley investigated children’s language acquisition in 42 families with newborns. As reported in the article “What It Takes To Be A Student” in the New York Times Magazine on November 26, 2006, for the first three years of each child’s life, the researchers visited their families once a month, recording everything that occurred between parents and children.

They found that vocabulary growth varied tremendously by class — by age three, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of roughly 1,100 words, while children whose parents were on welfare had acquired an average of only 525 words. Furthermore, children’s scores on IQ tests correlated strongly with their vocabularies.

But what caused this large difference in vocabularies? It turns out that the professional parents spoke to their children far more frequently, were more encouraging, and addressed their children in richer, more complex sentences.

In the professional homes, each hour parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a speech — to their children. In welfare homes, the children heard only 178 utterances per hour.

And almost as staggering, by age three, the average child in a professional home heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. But for welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, roughly 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements.

Unsurprisingly, Hart and Risley concluded that language exposure in early childhood, especially affirmations and complex sentences, had positive effects on children’s IQs and future academic success. And although the two researchers didn’t study storytelling per se, storytelling is obviously a great way to expose children to complex language.

And don’t worry about turning every story into a vocabulary lesson. When you are speaking to a three-year-old, “complex” does not mean you have to throw in tons of dependent clauses or study your thesaurus for obscure Latin derivatives. By simply telling stories with abstract themes, real feelings, cause and effect, past and future — elements that you would naturally include in almost any tale — you will be stimulating your child’s intellectual development and language acquisition AND having fun!

If you would like some advice on how to tell age-appropriate tales to your young child, check out TallTales’ Storyelling Tips for Parents of Toddlers and Preschoolers.