With school starting, parents wonder what they can do to help their children succeed. Almost everyone knows that reading books with young children is important, and it is. But even more important is that we talk with our children. A lot. The more talk children engage in with adults, the bigger their vocabularies will become. The bigger their vocabularies when they enter kindergarten, the better they do with reading comprehension tasks – even 11 years later. Not all kinds of talk with children are equally beneficial. Reprimanding a child is not a good opportunity to learn language. Commanding children to buckle their seat belts or brush their teeth may be necessary, but is also not optimal for helping them to acquire language. Children may be upset if scolded or, at best, uninterested when commanded, both conditions that interfere with learning.