The most productive thing you can do to ready your children for school with age-appropriate verbal ability is for you to use language appropriate to your age. By the time children enter kindergarten, parents’ speech habits have become the children’s, and the attitude parents demonstrated toward language development will enable or hinder their children for the rest of their lives.

One my most difficult tasks as a language teacher, from kindergarten through graduate school, was to persuade students to form their language by recognized conventions rather than relying on “what sounds right.” When students hear nonstandard grammar at home, what is in fact correct will “sound wrong” and what is incorrect will “sound good.”

Not only is it unnecessary to teach rules of grammar at home, I feel it’s easier and more productive just for parents to use standard English in everyday conversation. Children will copy this and speak and write correctly as a normal way of expressing themselves.

Eventually, they will need to learn the rules or conventions, and this is done effectively in school language arts classes. If you demonstrate standard English at home, your children will find not only is it easy to learn the technicalities, they will experience pleasure in doing so. All the teacher will be doing is to give them specific reasons for talking the way they find it natural to talk.

Most parents who use improper language, have no idea how difficult they make it for their children to learn language in school. Even those who want to help don’t recognize they have actually created problems. This is almost cruel—certainly unfair.

When you miscount your change at a store, you point this out to the children and use it as an example of the importance of learning to add and subtract. Why, then, should you consciously make grammatical errors and set a bad example for your own children?

In some homes it’s even worse. Students earnestly and sincerely learn correct English usage in school and then use it at home. Some parents actually jump on their educated children as if their correct language is socially offensive.“ And just who do you think you are with all that fancy talk?”

Such is not only immature, you so betray how ashamed you are of yourself that you can’t tolerate correct English used in your presence, because it creates an unfavorable contrast.. And then you take your immaturity and irresponsibility out on the kids.

I understand a child who is learning English as a second language would revert to a native tongue at home, where parents speak little or no English. It’s understandable to me when some of my students reverted to substandard English at home. Understandable in light of the hostility they might otherwise face at home, but it’s a totally inexcusable home situation.

I have been in many immigrant homes where the parents gratefully learn English from their children who learned it in school. How strange that immigrants should value English more than some who have never heard anything but English all their lives.

Actually, immigrant children learning English as a second language have a decided advantage over native speakers, i.e., they don’t need to unlearn bad English first.

Parents do not themselves need to return to school and study English from the start. In most cases, there are just a few especially intolerable expressions that can be cleaned up and make it substantially better for the kids. They can overcome the rest.

More than a few parents burden their children with their own bad English. In most instances it is something the children can overcome if they are willing to work hard enough. What a shame they have to. In some extreme instances, where parents harass their children for trying to improve, is it too much to consider this a form of child abuse?

Good parents are eager to do any number of things to make it easier for their children to learn and get along in life. I challenge us to improve our language reasonably—and just do it for the kids.