New moms at three area hospitals are getting children’s books to take home, courtesy of the North Central Regional Betterment Coalition’s Words Matter program. Coalition president J. Burt says each mom will get six books for ages zero to three. The idea is to encourage reading to the child to give him or her a head start with language and intellectual development. He says a baby’s brain starts working on language a lot sooner than many of us realize.
Burt says when kids given that kind of head start go to school, they’re ahead of kids who didn’t get it.