In every culture, a child's first word is a moment of great excitement. This is so because it signals their membership in human society. From this beginning, language will grow and become the vehicle, the carrying force for the child's intelligence, creativity and personality. Words are the building blocks of our communication system. The song of our humanity depends on them.

The primary caregivers are the first language teachers. Every child learns to speak in the accent and dialect of the native speakers they hear. What is not always so clear is that the future quality of their language is largely dependent on the level of speaking in their primary environment. This includes parents, siblings, regular members of their households, relatives and neighbours. This is enriched by exposure to the media, largely television, videos, computer-generated programs, games and books.

Parents can and sometimes do create an enriched language experience through the books they provide and read to their children. Unfortunately, this is not as common as it needs to be, because young parents are not aware of the impact of reading on the child's future success as a student and citizen. In the following pages, I will explain why this childhood activity is as important to their healthy mind growth as food is to the growth of their young bodies.

In my own pre-television childhood, I depended on books for entertainment. They were freely available in my household and as soon as I learned to read, I gained access to libraries in my school and neighbourhood that became a regular and favourite place to be. I remember with great pleasure my Saturday afternoons of Bobsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and, of course, the Oz books and Disney comics. There was always a book on the go and several waiting to be read, even after "lights out" with a flashlight under the covers, a caper obviously tolerated by my parents.

When a young mother myself, searching for ways to deal with the issue of how to relate to a squirming active child, I read to them. From infancy, they experienced the visual wonder of the pictures in children's books and the aural experience of hearing a story told, often over and over in exactly the same way. Indeed, an attempt to vary or shorten the text brought cries of outrage or derision as their little minds memorized the texts they couldn't yet read.

Their childhood shelves were piled high with books of every kind. We subscribed to book clubs and books came regularly as special treasures in the mail. I have fixed in my mind's eye the image of my small daughter waiting quietly on the stoop beside her pile of books for our Saturday excursion to the local library, where for the next hour I could have the wonderful freedom to cruise and read while she collected her pile of books on a child's table for the next week's reading. Every night before bedtime, the ritual of reading books, reading nursery rhymes and singing children's songs went on, well into late childhood.

Books of every kind were part of this experience. The old books I loved as a child -- The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, the Mowgli stories, Black Beauty, Treasure Island, and the books of that time, the latest Dr. Seuss, etc. Can you imagine the rich language experience this produced, especially since it occurred in the warm bonding of sitting on a parent's lap or beside them in close proximity, sharing the wonder of the story?

Of course, this way of relating to a child was purely intuitive and based on my own love of reading and childhood experiences. It was only many years later, after a full career as teacher and psychologist that I realized what the effect of this activity was and how this understanding could be used to enrich the communication and reading skills of this generation of children.

In my career as teacher, psychologist and Director of the Vancouver Learning Centre, I found many children whose access to school success was limited because they were not good readers. Strangely, there was a high correlation between a low level of reading skill and language and vocabulary skills. This parallel seemed to worsen as the grades proceeded and the gap between the poor readers and their classmates grew. Further, these children's anxiety around reading made it a non-preferred activity. (Their reading experience was slow and laborious, tinged with fear of failure and boredom because of the limited meaning that emerged for them.) They rarely became voluntary readers who experienced the pleasure I described earlier. Even when parents try to read to such children, the anxiety and boredom spills over into the relationship and their resistance makes even the most willing parent give up on the activity.

Unfortunately, the lack of reading activity further delays the growth of vocabulary skills. This makes the reading of such words difficult and, as the years progress, they have more and more trouble understanding what they read in their text books and what their teacher talks about in their classes in Social Studies and Science.

Further, intellectual development and thinking about ideas and concepts depends on having the words to do it with. Thus, children's thinking skills and their success in the primary and elementary school curriculum are strongly impacted by the level of vocabulary they have achieved.

Further yet, their sense of themselves as successful students, so dependent on the feedback from school grades and teachers' opinions, are formed. Their visions and dreams for their own future are impacted by this experience so that their success in high school is also carved out by this achievement base. This leads to their post-secondary school choices and their career opportunities.

In our time, when young parents raised in a television era themselves may have had minimal access to the kind of early childhood reading experiences I described, it is of urgent importance to raise their awareness on the effects of the early childhood language development through reading on future school and life success of their children.

Nor should we depend on the schools to do this job any more than we would expect society's institutions to feed our children the nourishing food they need from infancy to school. By the time children reach Kindergarten; their language level is determining their access to the aural instruction methods of modern schooling. Their teachers, whose credentials depend on four years of university success, have excellent vocabularies. They use them naturally in all their interactions with children. Nor are they aware of the impoverished language bases of some of their little students. Of course, children from cultures where reading is not a part of early childhood care giving, and children who speak English as a second language, are especially vulnerable.

As children learn to read, they find it easier to learn the words they already know. Textbooks and storybooks are more accessible and exciting to children who know the meaning of the words they read. Before long, those with impoverished language bases become the poor readers.

In the primary school culture, everyone knows which children are in the lower reading groups. However, this is masked by names like "Bluebirds" or "Robins." Thus, "smartness" in the child's culture becomes associated with good reading. This expectancy affects teacher, child and parent, thus associating good reading with overall intelligence and thinking ability in everyone's mind. Self-esteem derived from reading and intellectual status then becomes one of the key variables in determining the future academic and life outcome for children.

We live at a time when citizens are thoroughly immersed in the 21^st century's information and knowledge eras. Our ability to communicate is carried by our knowledge of words. At this point, access to print and good reading skills is essential, but even if this becomes superfluous in the lifetime of our children, they still will have to speak and understand language to be effective in their global communities. Thus, more than ever, words and language will become the essential building blocks of intelligence, thinking and economic success of 21^st century citizens.

Luckily, we are ready language learners at any age. The procedures and strategies of the Language Box Program, while directed in a preventative and enrichment mode to children from two to eight years old, can be used as a remedial strategy at any age, including adolescence and young adulthood. A section at the end of this book will address this aspect.

Parents and educators can and must take responsibility for the future success of the children whose life challenges in a rapidly changing world are unpredictable at present. Giving them the strong mind skills that can be built on a rich language base and the love of books, words and stories so that they will search out the reading experiences as they grow, is the greatest and most wonderful gift we can give. This legacy will reverberate into future generations as the descendants of such children put the "Let's read" request into the very culture of the nation.