Small Talk
Richard Bell Dads Column – Issue 14
Our once gorgeous gurgling incomprehensible cutie pie is talking…and listening…and understanding. Lord help us!
The books (being the many books on offer to parents that, by and large, seem to contradict one other) cover speech in a variety of ways. The popular one, like walking and eating, is to give a deadline while we worry ourselves stupid about whether or not there is something wrong if our children don't meet, match or exceed it! (Parentnoia, I call it).
It is like a toy that has a 12-month plus age limit on the box and at fourteen or fifteen months they are still coming to grips with it. What's wrong?
My Dad has a reassuring quip:
“You don't see many 18 year olds in nappies and bibs”. Great! I can relax now, thanks Dad.
This coming from a man who, as a practical joke on his mum, smeared peanut butter in my nappy and began to eat it as he changed me. Hmm, that explains a lot.
Back to speech, I think! We talked non-stop to our little girl from when she was born. Mostly, we described the world around her and challenged her with questions about noises that related to animals, machinery and a broad spectrum of music and nursery rhymes.
Thanks to this she has a good understanding of words and is developing a wide vocabulary as well as becoming an excellent mimic. Her lion is especially good at six in the morning!
Inevitably though, as children grow and soak up the knowledge from the world around them so does their understanding and confidence to string words together with purpose and, above all, clarity.
Unfortunately, they also have an extraordinary sense of repeating the inappropriate and a finely tuned profanity radar scanning the airwaves for that one time when you forget yourself.
This economy of words and painful honesty combination that toddlers have stands in stark contrast to the procrastinating media with their bunkum.
For example a baby wipes advertisement on TV: “The softest and most delicate pH balanced wipe imaginable. Dermatologically tested on clouds and guaranteed to lock in moisture”.
Now toddler baby wipes advert: “I pooh pooh, wipe my bottom.” What a simple, straightforward world that would be: no frills or pseudo science just the bare facts.
I love the complete lack of tact too: “Daddy, where your hair gone?” (Trip to the barbers) “Mummy, big tummy?” (Overindulgence) “You smelly, Grandma?” (Flatulence) and “Uncle Maffew a monkey?” (Hairy uncle on holiday).
At twenty-four months reason and logic have become bedfellows with guile and mischief. A lollypop or a new toy is a chance to set mum against dad and, combined with spontaneous tantrums and shouts of “NO” and “WHY?” The terrible two's descend upon the once fuzzy warm family atmosphere like a sledgehammer on a marshmallow!
An argument, started over who caved in and gave her the chocolate buttons, now has a third party usually taking mummy's side and frog marching me to the naughty seat with short, two syllable bursts, ringing in my ears along the way like some diminutive Sergeant Major on the parade ground.
For me though, the development of speech is as much about the person they are becoming, as it is the influences all around them. Their use of words in or out of context, their inflections and recognisable dialectic 'twang' from either or both parents and the adorable nonsense they come out with that has us parents holding our ribs with laughter.
Out of the mouths of babes!
