All of our products are designed around baby’s active engagement; this is what creates “brain magic”! Baby-Led Learning uses a contingent process—Where the baby completes a repeatable action to trigger a learning lesson. When a baby is only a few months old, the only reliably intentional and repeatable action they can take is with their mouths, therefore our first product, the smallTalk Paci, utilizes a pacifier. Soon, smallTalk will introduce new products targeted for later infancy, when the baby can reliably use their hands for touching, twisting, and pulling actions to unlock our language content. Our goal is to continually create products for your child to interact with and acquire a foreign language (or two!).

For babies who are not interested in a pacifier, Baby & Me Learning consists of small activities for baby and a caregiver to do together. These lessons, similar to Baby-Led Learning, ensure that baby is actively engaged in their environment. Baby & Me Learning will be available through The smallTalk App with our guided lesson plans.

Using The smallTalk Paci & a Philips Soothie (or JollyPop or Gumdrop pacifiers), your baby will interact with lullabies, songs, and stories in the language you’ve selected. When baby sucks on the pacifier, The smallTalk App will play 10 seconds of audio content. The content will then fade away until baby sucks on the pacifier again. Your little one’s little brain will learn this cause and effect relationship quickly and continue to ‘ask’ for the content, creating lasting connections in their brain–language pathways that last a lifetime.

Baby’s brain will benefit from just 20 learning sessions–each 5 or more minutes in length, but going beyond 20 sessions is wonderful too! To avoid overstimulation, the lesson will turn off after a single learning session has reached 20 minutes.

At this time, smallTalk does not support multiple users (and therefore, multiple babies) per account. You can, however, run the same foreign language with multiples by self-monitoring how many learning sessions each child has. The goal is to reach 20 learning sessions per language, per baby. To achieve this, you can simply alternate learning lessons between your babies and keep a running tally as you go. We’d love to hear from you on how it works with your babies, to inform us as we make modifications to make it easier for parents like you.

But don’t overthink it! Being a parent of a newborns is tough and we get it. Exposing your child to smallTalk in any amount is great—keeping track of the exact numbers is just a cherry on top!

Most importantly, you will know baby is benefiting simply by watching their enjoyment as they engage with smallTalk. But if you’d like to read all the science that explains what’s happening in your little one’s brain, you can do so right here!