Claims

Georgia is implementing a public-private partnership called 'Talk with Me Baby' involving United Way, The Anne E. Casey Foundation, Public Health, the Department of Early Child Care and Learning, and The Marcus Foundation, designed to change the paradigm around early language development.

The Marcus Foundation is involved in developing tools to teach healthcare providers (nurses, hospitals, doctors) how to communicate to patients about the importance of early language learning and how to implement it.

The Women, Infant and Child Nutrition Program (WIC) is different from food stamps because it requires participants to visit a nutritionist every three months and only allows purchases of specific foods, making it a point of contact where language nutrition education can be integrated with food nutrition education.

In Georgia, 50-60 percent of babies qualify for and are enrolled in WIC, and with 159 WIC offices across Georgia's 159 counties, there is geographic reach to every part of the state.

We are on the precipice of the next transformational change in public health, which is the deep understanding of the importance of language development and the determination to ensure absolutely universal, effective early language development.