Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child's Potential, Fulfilling Society's Promise - Hardcover

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Dana Suskind, MD, is founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health, director of the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Program, and professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago. Dr. Suskind is the author of over forty-five scientific publications and Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain. She is a member of the American Academic of Pediatrics and a fellow for the Council on Early Childhood. Her work has been profiled by numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, The Economist, Forbes, NPR, and Freakonomics. 

Lydia Denworth is an award-winning science writer and a contributing editor at Scientific American. She is the author of several books of popular science including Friendship: The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond and I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey Through the Science of Sound and Language.

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Toward a New North Star

"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."

-Nelson Mandela

As we near the "red line," the demarcation between the hospital's pre-op area and its collection of operating rooms, a mother and father hand me their baby. Their eyes are filled with tears as they look at me with a combination of hope and fear. The little boy is just eight months old and was born deaf. He is here to receive his cochlear implant. When I surgically implant the small device that will give him access to sound, I am replicating what I did for his father many years earlier when he was a teenager. As the baby melts into my arms, I reassure his nervous parents, "I promise to care for your baby like he's my own."

The parents settle in for a long, anxious wait, while I carry their son to the operating room. In OR4, where I spend each Tuesday morning, we are greeted by the team of medical professionals I rely on for every surgery, and by the cacophony of monitor beeps that I find so comforting every time I hear it. My two OR nurses are circulating. Gary Rogers makes sure the cochlear implant is present and that my favorite drill and facial nerve monitor are working properly. Nelson Floresco checks out the operating room microscope, which is the size of a Smart Car and gives me a remarkably clear, precise view of the ear's tiny, delicate interior spaces. Robin Mills, the OR tech, is scrubbed in and organizing the array of sterile microscopic ear instruments on the surgical table. The pediatric anesthesiologist gently places a face mask filled with colorless gases on the squirming baby. Very quickly, the baby is fast asleep.

Before I start the operation, we double-check that everything is in order. Do we have the right patient? Check. Do we have the correct implant with all the right instruments? Check. Do we know if the patient has any medical allergies? Check. Are the pre-operative antibiotics in? Check. This routine ensures the accuracy and safety of what we're doing. Each person in the operating room plays an essential role. No one forgets why we are here: to help a child.

As a surgeon performing delicate work just millimeters from the brain, I have no room for error. It's critical that I have the necessary tools and, even more importantly, my A-team by my side. If any part of this carefully crafted system falls away, no matter my skill or good intentions, my job will be infinitely more difficult, if not impossible. Some obstacles can be overcome-a few missing instruments, for instance. But what if the power went out in the hospital and I suddenly had to operate without light or oxygen? Or what if Robin, Gary, and Nelson suddenly walked out the door, leaving me alone? The odds would be stacked against me, and the job would seem impossible.

The challenge of successfully rearing children is not so different. To raise a child into a happy, healthy adult capable of achieving their full potential, you need a plan, and you need an appropriate, safe environment, one that provides backup as required. But far too many parents are not operating-that is, parenting-in an optimal environment. For too many parents, in our country and throughout the world, it is as if they are trying to function in the midst of an endless power failure, asked to achieve a critical goal without the necessary tools or any backup.

Twenty years ago, I started my own life as a parent with what I thought were all the necessary tools in place. But, in one painful day, it all changed, when my husband, Don, drowned while trying to rescue two boys, leaving me a young widow and my three children with no father. While we still had a roof over our heads and food on the table, advantages that many families lack, Don's death left a vast hole in our lives.

For a long time after he died, I would wake at night, jolted by the same terrifying nightmare, which went something like this: I'm standing on a foggy riverbank. Splinters of moonlight stream through the clouds and illuminate a small wooden boat next to me at the water's edge. Three small, terrified faces-my young children, Genevieve, Asher, and Amelie-peer from the boat, staring at the foreboding river. Its fierce currents resemble the waters of Lake Michigan, whose undertow claimed Don's life. I feel the intense pull of the water, the same pull that Don must have faced when he left the protective shoreline to swim toward the cries of the two struggling boys. Like Don, I have a desperate need to ensure young children are safe. In my dream, I have to get my kids across the river. I believe that if I can just do that, they will be okay . . . It will all be okay. But the torrent is too rough, the boat too flimsy, the opposite riverbank too far away. I wake sobbing, helpless, alone.

It was not hard to grasp the significance of my dream. I wanted what all parents want: to ferry my children into healthy, stable, and productive adult lives-that is what awaited on the far shore. I wanted to give them every opportunity. But it would take some time before I saw how fully all the elements of my dream-the turbulent water, the inadequate boat, the fact that there was no one standing next to me on that riverbank-symbolized the hurdles that so many parents face in the effort to successfully rear their children.

How could I navigate that torrent on my own, with no support, no help? How can anyone? Although I had been a surgeon for years and thought I had a deep familiarity with the lives of the families whose children I cared for, my struggles as a grieving, single parent gave me a new window of understanding into the challenges facing families.

Thirty Million Words . . . and Beyond

I became a surgeon because I thought I could change lives, one child at a time. By giving deaf children cochlear implants, I give them access to sound, to hearing, and to spoken language. I want there to be no barriers to their success, and I believe restoring their access to sound accomplishes that. Sign language can provide a rich, early language environment when provided by fluent signers. The baby whose surgery I just described is now fluent in two languages-American Sign Language and English. But the reality is that more than 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents who don't sign. And early in my practice, I noticed profound differences in my patients' progress after surgery. Some children excelled developmentally, others not at all. Some learned to talk, others did not. The ability to hear, it turned out, did not always unlock their full capacity to learn and thrive intellectually. I could neither accept nor ignore the disturbing disparities I saw among my patients, but I didn't understand them. Compelled to discover their cause and to find solutions, I began a journey far outside the operating room and into the world of social science.

Initially, I was inspired by pioneering research that found a stark difference in the amount of language-the actual number of words-that children were exposed to early in life. That difference often, although not always, fell along socioeconomic lines, with more language occurring in more affluent homes and less language in homes where families have been denied access to educational opportunities, often for generations. Researchers calculated that by the time children reached their fourth birthday, there was a gap of roughly thirty million words between those who heard a lot of language and those who heard very little. Although the research was done in hearing children, it explained what I was observing in my patients. In order to fully benefit from their new cochlear...