Manz Receives Grant to Advance Digital Parenting Intervention

COE Professor Patti Manz has received a Stage 1 Seed Translational Research Project (STRP) award through Lehigh University’s National Science Foundation-funded (NSF) Accelerating Research Translation (ART) initiative to expand the reach of Little Talks, a parenting intervention designed to strengthen communication and language development among infants and toddlers.

The award will support  Manz’s project, “Little Talks – Digital Parent Intervention: Promoting Communication & Language Development for Infants-Toddlers,” and enable her to begin transforming Little Talks from a researcher-supported, manualized intervention into an interactive digital program that parents can more readily access and use.

Little Talks focuses on a critical period in a child’s development: birth through age 3. Manz developed the intervention to support families experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage, recognizing both the link between socioeconomic status and children’s long-term development and the lack of evidence-based language interventions designed for low-income families.

“Parents are their children’s first and most important teachers, particularly during the first three years of life when communication and language skills are developing so rapidly,” Manz said. “Little Talks was created to give parents strategies that fit naturally into the interactions and routines they already share with their children. Moving Little Talks into a digital environment gives us an opportunity to make those resources available to many more families.”

Unlike a one-size-fits-all parenting curriculum, Little Talks combines evidence-based strategies for encouraging language with parents’ own culturally rooted beliefs and approaches to interacting with their children. Lessons are matched to a parent’s interaction style, the child’s current communication abilities, and everyday activities and routines that can become opportunities for language development.

Little Talks was developed through a collaborative approach involving parents, early childhood professionals, and community partners. Manz and her collaborators have studied the intervention through community-based participatory research and randomized research, including work with Early Head Start. 

Research has shown increased parental involvement in infants’ and toddlers’ learning experiences and lower rates of parental depression. Children whose communication and language abilities were developing at expected levels showed greater growth over time, while growth rates doubled among at-risk infants and toddlers who entered the intervention with skills below age expectations. The strongest benefits were observed among parents and children experiencing the greatest socioeconomic vulnerability.

A randomized controlled trial examining Little Talks as part of Early Head Start also demonstrated benefits compared with typical Early Head Start services and found greater parent engagement when Little Talks was incorporated into the program.

Despite those results, the program’s current format limits how broadly it can be used.

The digital initiative marks a new phase for a program built through years of community-based research.

Little Talks presently relies on an analog, manualized model in which trained providers help parents navigate lessons and determine which strategies best match the parent and child. Translating that process into a self-guided digital format could allow families to access Little Talks directly while providing early childhood and family-service organizations with a more scalable and cost-effective way to offer the intervention.

The Stage 1 funding will allow Manz to develop an operational digital prototype while preserving one of Little Talks’ defining characteristics: its ability to adapt to individual parents and children.

The prototype is expected to include three major new features: a self-guiding mechanism that recommends lessons based on information parents provide about their interaction styles and their child’s communication abilities; a dashboard that helps parents navigate the program and track progress and accomplishments; and a coach chat function that allows parents to communicate privately with Little Talks coaches.

Rather than simply converting a printed manual into webpages, the project seeks to digitally reproduce the individualization that previously depended on a Little Talks coach. Parents will provide information about their goals, preferred activities and routines, interaction styles, and their child’s development in communication. The digital system will use that information to guide them toward lessons designed to build on existing strengths while introducing new strategies.

The digital version is also expected to incorporate the Little Talks Family Blog and web-based lessons already under initial development.

Parent participation will remain central to the project. Manz’s proposal calls for a user-centered development model in which parents help evaluate and refine the digital program rather than having researchers determine its design in isolation. Future testing would examine ease of use, parents’ engagement with the platform, how frequently Little Talks strategies are used during parent-child interactions, and changes in parent involvement and children’s communication and vocabulary development. 

“Technology gives us the ability to broaden access, but accessibility is about much more than putting something online,” Manz said. “The digital Little Talks program has to be useful, intuitive, culturally responsive, and meaningful to the parents who will use it. That means parents need to remain partners in its development.”

After successfully completing the Little Talks prototype, Manz will be eligible to pursue Stage 2 and Stage 3 funding to further develop, field test, and ultimately translate the intervention for broader use.

For Manz, the goal is not simply to create a new technology platform. It is to take an intervention supported by years of research and make it easier for parents and organizations serving young children to put that research into practice.

“Little Talks has always been about strengthening what happens between a parent and child during ordinary moments — sharing a book, playing, talking during a routine, or responding to a child’s first attempts to communicate,” Manz said. “The digital version is a way to put those tools into more parents’ hands.””