Happy talk!

Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk!

Or any kind of talk.

To your baby, that is...

...or your grandbaby.

Talk back when your pre-verbal child babbles at you -- that sweet, burbling little girl is talking to you, but you can't yet understand what she's saying.

Linguist Deborah Fallows (July/August 2013 issue of The Atlantic) reports on a decade of compelling research that shows the lifelong benefits of talking TO and WITH your kids, even when they're too young to talk back.

You know this is true. It's intuitive.

Let the children hear new words and inflected meanings and syntax when they're most open to learning them.

One researcher says it with bare truth:

"You can only do one thing at a time: talk to the baby or talk on the phone."

Stash your iPhone! Here come the kids!