Campaign urges parents and nurses to ' talk with me baby '

The School of Nursing and the Georgia Department of Health are among the partners in Talk With Me Baby, a public awareness campaign led by the Marcus Autism Center and funded with $1.5 million from United Way over three years. The Atlanta-area campaign targets parents and nurses to prevent language delays, especially among at-risk children, by coaching parents to talk more to their infants.  As part of the campaign, assistant nursing professor Ashley Darcy-Mahoney PhD NNP-BC is developing a curriculum to train nurses about the importance of social interaction with babies in and outside of the womb. Faculty and students in the Human-Computer Interaction Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology are creating the technological components of Talk With Me Baby, including a website, videos, and smartphone app. Other partners include the Georgia Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and the Georgia Department of Education.