As you search for the "best" toys and gifts for your child this year, keep in mind that the best gift needs no batteries. Well, you do need to keep your "batteries" charged, but you don't run on alkaline batteries!

Children under the age of three need all sorts of things: love, food, play, varied experiences, nurturing, kindness, and more love. There's another "L" word they also really need a lot of, and that's language.

Children need language input in a big way. The more a child is spoken to directly by a parent or other significant adult during the first four years is crucial to his or her language development. And a child's language development is a huge predictor of school success. Success in school leads to success in life!

When children enter school able to understand a lot of words and able to listen to and understand spoken directions and explanations, they are ready to build on that knowledge. Children who enter kindergarten without the same language skill as the best language users are already behind and cannot catch up to the others.

Just think, before your child blows out the candles on his or her 3rd birthday cake, the opportunity for you to help him or her be ready to be the best learner possible is already fading. The human brain is capable of learning new things throughout a person's lifetime, but the critical period for building the language "wiring" in the brain occurs in the early years.

There is strong research evidence that what happens in language learning in the first three years is closely matched to the success children experience in school. The same research even discovered significant differences in measured intelligence levels relative to how many words children heard said directly to them during the first three years.

Unfortunately, the study results showed further that the number of words children heard daily closely correlated with the economic status of their parents. Children of parents who had professional jobs heard the most words, children of parents living in poverty heard the lowest number of words, and children of working parents heard a number between these two.

Even though economic conditions often contribute to how parents interact with their children, they don't have to. A parent committed to the well-being of his or her child has the same ability to talk as any other parent. Talking positively and informatively throughout the day to one's child doesn't cost any money. A parent may need to learn how to do this to best advantage, but the act of talking is free - and it needs no batteries!