Your Baby and Child

Author:Leach, Penelope [Leach, Penelope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307594426
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Good books and useful talk go together.

Help your baby to use his few words in obviously useful situations. If you are playing together and you can both see where the ball has rolled to, ask him to get it for you. When he crawls back with it you can confirm that he understood you correctly by thanking him, using the word again: “Good boy, you’ve brought your ball.” If you then continue playing ball with him, the whole transaction of words and actions will have an obvious and pleasurable point, and the word will probably stay in his memory.

Don’t correct or pretend not to understand own-words. It’s important to give your baby the correct version of a word he has mispronounced, but trying to make him say that word again “properly” will only bore him. He does not want to say the same thing again better; he wants to say something else now. Your corrections are unlikely to have any effect anyway because, as we have seen, he is not imitating language but developing it. His own-word will evolve into something more correct in its own good time but not at your command.

If you pretend not to understand the baby unless he says something “properly,” you are doing worse than boring your baby: you are cheating him. He has communicated with you—said something and made you understand his meaning. He has therefore used a piece of language. If you refuse to acknowledge it, you spoil the flow of his language in favor of mere words. Furthermore, he may not be able to produce the “correct” word because that word has not evolved for him yet. If his own-word is the best that he has to offer, rejecting it will hinder rather than help him. After all, it is pleasure, affection and excitement that motivate early speech. Refusing him his bottle until he says “milk” instead of “bah-boo” will make him frustrated and cross. You are more likely to get tears than words.

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