Professor Dana Suskind, the founder and director of the Thirty Million Words Initiative … this blog had an accumulated a total of 30 million hits by late yesterday afternoon
Patrick Comerford
The viewing and reading figures for this blog continue to surprise me, and these figures passed the 30 million mark by lunchtime this afternoon (29 March 2026).
This is the fifth time this month alone that the million figure in readership numbers has been passed: 29 million four days ago (25 March), 28 million on 20 March, 27 million on 12 March, and 26 million at the beginning of the month (1 March). The number of hits on two days this month have been the highest daily figures I have ever recorded: 323,156 on Friday (27 March 2026) and 318,307 on 1 March.
This year so far has seen a phenomenal amount of traffic on this blog, reaching a volume of readers that I never have expected when I first started blogging 16 years ago. Half the total hits (15 million) have been within little more than eight months, since 25 July 2025. The total hits last month (February 2026) had been the highest monthly total ever (3,386,504), but that figure has already been outpaced this month, with a total of over 4.2 million by early this afternoon.
At the end of last year, this blog had 21 million hits (31 December 2025). So far this year, there have been more than 9 million hits or visitors in 2026.
I first began blogging in 2010, and it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers – a number reached eight times this month alone. Half of the 29.5 million hits have been within the last nine or ten months, since mid-July.
Throughout this year and last, the daily figures have been overwhelming on many occasions. Of the 12 days of busiest traffic on this blog, six were this month (March), three were in February, one was in January, and two were in January 2025:
• 323,156 (27 March 2026)
• 318,307 (1 March 2026)
• 314,018 (28 February 2026)
• 301,449 (2 March 2026)
• 289,076 (11 January 2025)
• 285,366 (12 January 2025)
• 280,802 (26 February 2026)
• 273,022 (27 February 2026)
• 270,983 (25 March 2026)
• 261,422 (13 January 2026)
• 234,737 (26 March 2026)
• 228,931 (18 March 2026)
The number of readers continues to be overpowering and the daily averages are currently running at almost 145,000 hits a day so far this month. Ten years ago, the daily average was around 1,000.
The west façade of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela … Galicia in Spain covers 30 million square metres or 30,000 sq km (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
To put today’s figure of 30 million in context:
In her book
Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain, Professor Dana Suskind, the founder and director of the Thirty Million Words Initiative, explains why the most important yet simple thing a parent can do for a child’s future success in life is to talk to him or her. Her book, first published in 2015, looks at the recent science behind this truth, and outlines how parents can best put it into practice.
She argues that academic achievement begins on the first day of life with the first word said by a mother just after birth.
A study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley in 1995 found that some children heard 30 million fewer words by their fourth birthdays than others. The children who heard more words were better prepared when they entered school. These same children, when followed into third grade, had bigger vocabularies, were stronger readers, and got higher test scores. This disparity in learning is referred to as the achievement gap.
Professor Dana Suskind learned of this 30 million word gap in the course of her work as a cochlear implant surgeon at University of Chicago Medical School and began a new research programme along with her sister-in-law, Beth Suskind, to find the best ways to bridge that gap.
The Thirty Million Word Initiative has developed programmes for parents to show the kind of parent-child communications that enables optimal neural development and has tested the programmes in and around Chicago across demographic groups.
They encourage parents to follow the three Ts:
• Tune in to what the child is doing;
• Talk more to the child using lots of descriptive words;
• Take turns with your child as you engage in conversation.
She shows parents how to make the words they serve up more enriching. For example, instead of telling a child, ‘Put your shoes on,’ one might say instead, ‘It is time to go out. What do we have to do?’ The lab’s five-year longitudinal research programme received funding so they can further corroborate their results.
The neuroscience of brain plasticity could contribute to some of the valuable and revolutionary research in medical science today. It enables us to think and do better and is making a difference in the lives of people both the old and young.
The term ‘30-million-word gap’, often shortened to ‘word gap’, was originally coined by Betty Hart and Todd R Risley in their book
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children and later reprinted in the paper ‘The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3’. In their study of 42 Midwestern families in the US, Hart and Risley recorded an hour’s worth of language in each home once a month over 2½ years.
Prior to the 30-million-word-gap study, extensive research had noted strong institutional variation in student success on standardised tests. Sperry, Sperry, and Miller (2018) replicated Hart and Risley's study and found that the number of word gaps varied within the same backgrounds of socioeconomic status. Garcia and Otheguy (2016) were interested in the origins and validity of the Language Gap, and how the preconceptions of it impact bilingual and bidialectical children, specifically from Latino and Black backgrounds.
Hart and Risley’s research has been criticised by scholars. Paul Nation criticises the methodology, noting that comparing the tokens (words produced) and number of types (number of different words) in unequal samples is not comparing vocabulary sizes. Other critics theorise that the language and achievement gaps are not a result of the amount of words a child is exposed to, but rather alternative theories suggest it could derive from the disconnect of linguistic practices between home and school.
A recent replication of Hart and Risley’s study with more participants has found that the ‘word gap’ may be closer to 4 million words, not the oft-cited 30 million words previously proposed. Hart and Risley’s research has also been criticised for a perceived racial bias, with the majority of the welfare families and working-class families being African American, or that it ignores the fact that language and culture are taught differently.
Nonetheless, the 30-million-word gap has received widespread attention. The Clinton foundation’s ‘Too Small to Fail’ initiative which hosted the White House Word Gap event in 2014, resulted in the US Department of Health and Human services funding remedial efforts to address the Word Gap.
The University of Chicago, School of Medicine's Thirty Million Words Initiative provides intervention for caregivers and teaches to show them how to optimise their talk with their children. The Word Gap theory can be seen as part of a larger development in modern educational reform and movement: the Achievement Gap discourse.
The effects of the Achievement Gap Discourse cause several cultural phenomena – ‘cultural gate-keeping’, in which policy makers and education reformers decide and label students as more or less capable and worthy than others. The achievement gap became an especially strong interest for study at the turn of the century, and the early 2000s when a plethora of studies looked at factors such as standardised test scores, presence in class, GPA, enrolment, and dropout rates in secondary and post-secondary education.
The Oxford Word Gap is used to describe the word gap found between ethnic groups and socioeconomic classes in the UK.
Meanwhile, in other measurements, according to the 2024 Knight Frank Wealth Report, there are about 225,000 individuals in the US with net assets of $30 million or more, just 0.07% of the population. Yet, about a third of Americans cannot cover a $500 emergency, and more than 11% – almost 38 million people – live in poverty in the US. Meanwhile, a tiny fraction of individuals control more wealth than entire nations.
This imbalance destabilises democracy, distorts our economy, and limits human potential. A
recent report in Time magazine points out that far from expanding opportunity, this excessive wealth locks millions out of the chance to innovate and build, weakening growth for all. The report says a simple wealth tax of 50% annually on household wealth above $30 million would not dismantle ambition. Instead, it would convert excessive wealth for the very few into opportunity for all.
Countries with populations of about 30 million people include the Ivory Coast and Nepal. Greece is one of the world's most popular tourist destinations – more than 30 million visitors travel there every year. But
a report by ABC in Australia last month suggests the population of Greece is in freefall, with predictions it will drop by 20 per cent by 2050.
30 million square metres is 30,000 sq km, or the size of Lesotho, a country that is landlocked in Southern Africa and the largest of only three sovereign enclaves in the world, the others being San Marino and Vatican City, which are surrounded by Italy. It is also the approximate size of Armenia and of Galicia in Spain and Normandy in France.
30 million minutes is 57 years and 14 days. In other words, if this blog was getting only one hit a minute, it would take 57 years, from March 1969, to reach this latest figure of 30 million.
It is four years since I retired from active parish ministry on 30 March 2022. These days, though, about 100-120 people on average are reading my daily prayer diary posted on this blog each morning. A similar number have been reading my recent series of postings on the churches and chapels of Walsingham over the past two weeks. I imagine many of my priest-colleagues would be prayerfully thankful if the congregations in their churches totalled 700-800 or more people each week.
This afternoon, I am very grateful to the real readers among those 30 million hits on this blog to date, and in particular I remain thankful to the faithful core group of about 100-120 people who join me in prayer, reading and reflections each day.
Greece has more than 30 million visitors travel there every year, but an Australian news report suggests the population of Greece will drop by 20 per cent by 2050 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
