Sarah Roseberry Lytle

Introduction As we enter fall, children across the country have headed back to school. For decades, researchers have investigated the “summer slide—when children’s achievement scores are lower in the fall than they were at the end of the previous school year. Since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted in-person learning, fears about children’s “learning loss” are of great concern for parents, practitioners, and policymakers.

Twitter Join the conversation on Twitter using #PlayfulLearningLandscapes More than half of the world’s children are growing up in cities. Yet, children and families are often invisible to urban planners, developers, and architects when implementing policies and practices that shape the built environment.

Significance How parents talk to infants is strongly associated with children’s language development, but many parents are not aware of this. We assigned families of 6-mo-old infants to a parent coaching intervention group or a no-coaching control group to determine whether specific parental language variables (“parentese”) can be enhanced through intervention. Naturalistic audio recordings were made in both groups at 6, 10, 14, and 18 mo of age.