Don’t talk down to children
Published 10:50 am Monday, December 1, 2008
A 4-year-old I very much like has a father I very much like because he is so good to his children. This father recently took his son to a friend’s farm to observe harvesting. In fact, the farmer got the boy up on the implement and drove him for a couple of rows. I wasn’t certain how much the boy understood and wanted to talk in language he would understand. I asked Chase, “Did you ride on the tractor?” He replied with confident sophistication: “No, on the Harvester.” Of course. Why “tractor” when you have the ability to learn “Harvester?”
I thought of this when I recently wrote of the responsibility parents have to send their children to kindergarten readied to learn with reasonable verbal ability, “the single most important indicator of general intelligence.” But how? The best way to start developing your children’s verbal ability is to talk with them in simple but normal language—forgetting “baby talk.”
You show a picture of a train engine and find yourself saying (as your parents said to you), “Look at the choo-choo.” Choo-Choo? What in the world, they will think, is a choo-choo? I’ve never see something that looks or sounds choo-choo. It might well be they will never in their lives ever see a choo-choo, a steam engine. (Of course, I can’t suggest a reasonable onomatopoetic word (sounds like the object) unless it would be Rurrh.) So why try?
In as much as children need to learn words (both their meaning and how to identify objects with them), they may as well learn the proper word at the outset. “Train” or even “engine” will do quite well. (Whether electric or diesel can wait.) Among other considerations, a child would need to unlearn “choo-choo” before being able to learn “engine.” Why add to their learning burden? Moreover, you would have told them something that isn’t true, and this weakens your credibility.
I am forced to search my mind for examples of baby-talk, because it’s a foreign language to me. My parents didn’t use it, and we refused to use it with our children or grandchildren. I didn’t use it when I taught kindergarten or the lower grades. But you know the sort of thing, because you hear it all the time.
One of the silliest uses of baby-talk is euphemisms (nice-sounding words) for body parts or functions. Some parents will claim they just don’t want to lay the real word on young minds.
In reality, the parents lack the maturity to use standard words without self-consciousness. It’s the parents who have the problems.
(Of course, there’s the physician’s little boy I know who felt he ought to let his Sunday school classmates in on the proper terminology. He announced, out of the blue, “Boys have penises but girls have vaginas.” He could have done worse.)
As children grow into adolescence, there is more parents need to understand about age-appropriate language. As a new teacher, I was told I should learn teen-age language to establish rapport with them. I talked to my high school students about this, and they taught me: Don’t even try. You can never learn it anyway, because we talk this way so you won’t know what we’re saying. If you learn teen-age language, you learn it from the junior high kids. By the time they learn it, we’re on to something else. Don’t make a fool of yourself. Be an adult and let us be who we are and have something of our own.
In the early years you will, of course, use simple words as concrete as possible. But let them be words from adult conversation. As they mature, however, enrich their vocabulary by introducing them to more precise words. Use these better words in talking with them and encourage their use.
Don’t even use baby-talk with babies. Use standard words, and they will learn their meaning by association with objects and actions. They will learn as quickly as if you used baby-talk. And then you won’t have to make them unlearn before moving on.
Help children progress toward adulthood with normal language; don’t yourself regress to childishness.