[Source: The Smart Talkers Blog]

This has long been a bone of contention among speech and language therapists and the basis of many a discussion between Franky and me. Here is an extract from the New York Times which sums up our concerns very well:
By Tara Parker-Pope from the New York Times
What direction does your child’s stroller face? New research raises questions about stroller design and the role it may play in a child’s language development.
M. Suzanne Zeedyk, a senior lecturer in developmental psychology at the University of Dundee in Scotland, studied the way 2,700 families interact with their infants and toddlers while pushing them in strollers. She found that caregivers were less likely to speak to infants when the child was facing forward, compared with strollers where the baby faces the caregiver — what she calls a toward-facing journey. In a small controlled experiment, the researchers gave 20 mothers and infants ages 9 to 24 months a chance to use both types of strollers, and recorded their conversations. She wrote about her findings in a recent Op-Ed article in The Times.
Mothers talked to their children twice as much during the 15-minute toward-facing journey, and they also laughed more. The babies laughed more, too.
Read the Rest of this Article on the Smart Talkers Blog