As my daughter rolls through her fifth year, I took it upon myself to initiate a timeworn tradition. I removed the stabilisers from her bicycle, determined to teach her to cycle without any assistance, just as my father taught me. It’s an anxious spectacle, not dissimilar to our avian friends perhaps, gently pushing our chicks closer to the precipice and encouraging them to fly.
Like any child learning a new skill, she struggled on her first day. The bicycle wobbled, the handlebars veered off in the wrong direction and her confidence was tested.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“What’s a Rome?” she asked.
READ MORE
“It’s a city,” I said. “It took hundreds of years to build. It takes time to learn how to ride a bike too.”
“But will it take hundreds of years like Rome?”
The idiom I’d inadvertently introduced to our training session, which quickly derailed into an anxious exchange on the relativity of time, got me thinking about the language we use with our kids. As my daughters have transitioned from the baby and toddler phase to being fully fledged girls, I have tried to consciously use proper, grown-up language with them as much as I can. It’s so easy to revert to parentese, the familiar baby talk that so much early parenting relies on to communicate. But what is the correct linguistic approach to take when speaking with our kids?
Sarah Kelly, a children’s speech and language therapist based in Dublin, believes baby talk can play an important role in early development.
[ How do I spot if my baby has tongue tie and what happens next?Opens in new window ]
“Parentese captures their attention,” she says. “We naturally will exaggerate our pitch, we will use nice melodies and expression ... the most important thing when modelling language for babies is getting them connected with you.”
However, Kelly says problems arise when baby talk becomes so exaggerated it transforms into gobbledegook.
“You are just the cwootest liddle diddums”, or some such nonsense.
[ How do I spot if my baby has tongue tie and what happens next?Opens in new window ]
This tendency to melt into silliness was satirised wonderfully in the 1989 movie Look Who’s Talking, when the baby’s interior voice (as played by an unlikely Bruce Willis) expresses alarm as his grandmother descends into nonsensical gibberish while she’s speaking to him.
Kelly says she has had multiple recent instances in clinic of families who use the phrase “day” instead of “goodbye” with their children. “It’s not ideal if you’re replacing words with other words,” she says.
Equally, the habit of dropping correct grammatical structures from sentences should be avoided. “We say to avoid telegrammatic speech,” she says. “That’s when you drop off the grammatical words. You wouldn’t say ‘Mummy go shop’. You say ‘Mummy is going to the shop’.”
We too often tend to talk down to children. The inclination to continue parentese well past babyhood is patronising to kids. I remember how condescending I found this as a child. Can we not empower our children by giving them the tools to express themselves properly much earlier in life? The best way to do this is to model the language we want them to use. My feeling is that when you speak with a child like an adult, you’re meeting them as an equal, and are therefore less likely to minimise their experiences and concerns.
We camouflage our conversational prejudice against children by asking them too many questions. Queries about age, school, sport and favourite colour will be listed off breathlessly within a minute of an adult beginning a panicked conversation with a child. We bombard them with questions because we feel uncomfortable speaking normally with someone we don’t yet view as an equal. Kelly says she sees this all the time and recommends the “Five Rule” as a solution: for every question you ask a child, make four statements. Try it. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
The more language a child has, the more equipped they are to explain their existence. While no one wants their child to be too precocious, reeling off the lyrics to Mary Poppins’s Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, arming them with the ability to articulate their feelings, their frustrations and their dreams enable them to communicate more easily.
We have a propensity, with small children in particular, to use replacement words instead of the actual word. Kelly cites an intriguing example of this common pitfall. Often a parent will use a symbolic sound in place of a noun. So, a train becomes a “choo choo”. She trainthis doesn’t help language progression because the child isn’t learning the real word. Instead, she encourages parents to make it clear that the symbolic word (choo choo) is describing the object (train).
“They’re naturally going to tune into the ‘choo choo’ because it’s higher pitched, it’s fun, it’ll capture their attention,” she says. “But you always reinforce the correct word as well.”
So, where does this leave me with my idiomatic approach to bicycle riding?
She reassures me idioms can absolutely be introduced for school-aged children. Preschoolers, on the other hand, interpret language literally, so idioms can get you into hot water pretty quickly. She cites the example of “raining cats and dogs”, where one can only imagine a toddler staring up into the sky, expecting a terrifying deluge of household pets to descend at any moment.
Idioms are an essential component of a child’s linguistic development because figurative language is cultural, getting right to the heart of how words inform our existence. To what extent do we need to explain idioms to children? Kelly says you should always clarify the meaning of new words, after you have used them. But I wonder if this is necessary? If I slump exhaustedly into a chair, telling my child I’ve “run out of gas”, it’s likely they will actively learn the meaning through my physical manner, without the need for exposition.
Perhaps a child can learn more deeply when they have to figure out the meaning for themselves.
