LENA and Texas Children’s Hospital are pleased to announce the launch of upWORDS, a program for families in the Houston area beginning this summer.

The upWORDS program will use the LENA Start model, which features group classes for parents in English and Spanish that employ LENA “talk pedometer” technology to measure how much parents are talking with their babies and how much their babies are responding in return.

LENA Start classes help parents and caregivers of infants and toddlers to close the early-talk gap and support their child’s kindergarten readiness. Research indicates that academic achievement gaps open early. That’s because children experience a period of rapid development during their first few years of life, with their brains developing more than 1 million neural connections every second.

LENA Start provides a series of efficient, engaging parent sessions where caregivers learn to use feedback from LENA technology about their home language environment, along with simple strategies to increase interactive talk with their children.

Since its introduction in 2015, LENA Start has been implemented by school districts, library systems, and other types of organizations in Huntsville, Ala., San Mateo County, Calif., Ames, Iowa, and Minneapolis, Minn. Texas Children’s is the first regional healthcare center to adopt the model. Results from initial implementations show an 82% graduation rate, with improvements in three key areas:

• 78 percent of adult caregivers are speaking more to their babies.
• 67 percent of families are having more conversations with their babies.
• Families reported reading twice as much with their babies as before.
• Children’s language scores are showing significant growth.

“We are so proud to be one of the first hospitals to launch a program like this,” said Dr. Christopher Greeley, chief of the Section of Public Health Pediatrics at Texas Children’s. “The earliest years of a child’s life present an incredible window of opportunity to deeply impact their growth and development. We often wait until the child hits preschool or kindergarten before we worry about language and speech. This program will allow us to train parents on language progression and techniques to understand how to provide the most successful environment for their child during these critical years.”

As noted in a recent editorial in The Journal of the American Medical Association, many healthcare organizations are expanding their missions to include health management for broader populations.

This expansion offers a critical opportunity to move toward initiatives aimed not only at managing, but at improving the health of broader populations, or what the authors term the “third curve” of academic health systems. The authors point out that realizing the third curve will require a broad range of cross-sector partnerships to “meaningfully tackle the panoply of factors underlying health outcomes.”

“The talk gap has really become a form of public health crisis,” said Dr. Stephen Hannon, president and chief operating officer of LENA. “The team at Texas Children’s understands that, which is why we’re thrilled to work with them on this program, furthering their mission to create a healthier future for women and children and our mission to close opportunity gaps through accelerating language development.”

In addition to parent group meetings, the upWORDS program will include an individual coaching component. Parents will meet with experts at Texas Children’s twice a month and focus on techniques tailored to their children to help achieve the best possible developmental outcomes.

LENA Team

The LENA Team is a dedicated group of professionals who are passionate about increasing awareness of the importance of early interactive talk. We are statisticians, speech-language pathologists, curriculum specialists, engineers, and linguists.