You’re supposed to use baby talk with them from about 15 years old and until they’re 18, to really piss them off.
The little shits have almost certainly done something to deserve it
Here I am just crying back at my baby
You mean like? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NP7SfpcsVhE
I have taught my kids to communicate with me solely via email, or via their lawyers.
The secret ingredient is unchecked alcoholism and rampant psychological abuse.
(/s, I don’t even have kids)
Denying their existence is totally on-brand
I have taught my kids to communicate with me entirely in Morse code via blinking.
It’s perfect as it’s nigh impossible to be interrupted, and back-talk doesn’t matter because they look too stupid to even get upset about.
If you treat your kids like an adult they grow up to be one. We see plenty of example of people who are of legal age acting like children. Now you know why.
It definitely works. They’ll grow up way faster. Like they’ll be out of your life 15 YEARS faster!
When my toddler son hit his sister, instead of giving him a ‘talking to’ like the parinting book suggested, I just called the cops. Now he’s in federal prison all on his own! I’m so proud of him. 🥰
It’s one thing to use baby talk with an infant, (hence the baby talk moniker), and another to speak that way to a child that is actually learning to form words and construct a sentence.
Use whatever voice you prefer with your pets. Dogs actually enjoy the soft sounds of baby talk. A bit of brilliant manipulation of humans by the dogs.
i’m pretty sure baby talk came about in the first place because it works, it genuinely helps infants develop and as you say pets generally enjoy it, i think the high pitch is easier for them to hear?
I won’t argue with your thought. I’m certainly no accredited expert either, just a dad that, along with my wife, raise 4 daughters and pets - mostly working hunting dogs.
My take is that baby talk is impossible to do in a loud and angry voice. And is always done in a soft and gentle tone. I have noticed that when training dogs, I’m a fan of Spaniels, that if you are speaking in a loud voice and that has angry tones, they will start to separate from you and watch you closely. Because ain’t no one wants to get yelled at. It’s kind of similar to loud sharp barking I suppose. Cats though, are generally arse holes and just don’t care…
When our Daughters were newborns, they started to make just sounds after about a month. So baby talk was was pretty much just making intelligible sounds back at them in a soft and soothing tone. As they started to actually learn and use “real” words, less baby talk and far more normal speech is used by parents I think. But children are also smart enough to know the different between the baby talk when playing peek-a-boo with daddy and then need for normal speech at other times.
I certainly don’t see baby talk to infants and small children as an issue except in rare disfunctional family situations.
Not sure why this triggered a snarky response unless Ted is just waving a monkey puppet for internet points. Talking normally to kids is not rocket science, and it’s not stereotypical yuppies desperate to get their gifted darlings into AP class. It’s very simple - little kids can handle normal speech just fine, so why use baby talk?
It really depends on the kid and the complexity of the message. Young kids are still learning the intricacies of the language and building a vocabulary. Not talking down to them helps build those skills up. But at the end of the day, if the message is not getting across, it’s the fault of the communicator.
Plus it’s an annoying flex to say “see how amazing my kid is? It’s all because of me!” Some kids just pick up language easier, some kids sleep all the way through the night earlier, some kids toilet train easier, etc. Usually it’s better for parents to quietly take the little victory rather than treat it as a reflection of their amazing parenting skills.
Exactly, there’s a difference between baby talk and using age reasonable vocabulary.
You don’t need to ask a 3 year old why they are being disobedient. But it’s perfectly reasonable to ask why they “aren’t doing what you asked them to do”.
Those are all different from why u no lissen bebe
Baby talk is garbage for communicating but it can be very funny for the baby and the parent.
regardless of a child’s inherent language skills I would argue that it’s a detriment to baby talk to them. surely the earlier they receive regular communication the sooner they are going to learn it.
I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure, it’s not that simple.
For one, you might not have much to chat about with your baby, so doing baby talk might actually get in more language training.
But then baby talk is also very emotionally charged. So, it might help with emotional development, or simply make the baby pay attention for longer and therefore actually help the language development.
Well, and then it also still depends on the baby. For example, this research suggests that babies with autism react differently to baby talk: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2022/toddlers-responses-to-baby-talk-linked-to-social-cognitive-language-abilities
For one, you might not have much to chat about with your baby, so doing baby talk might actually get in more language training.
In a good environment babies should be exposed to plenty of language. There’s tribal societies which don’t talk to their kids until they start to talk themselves and those kids turn out fine by all metrics researchers could throw at them. What they do do is take them with them everywhere.
You do not need to capture a baby’s attention for them to sponge up information. They do pretty much nothing else no matter what you do.
What has been shown to be beneficial is to give them the opportunity to talk to their caregivers earlier, figures that language capability develops faster than the capability to make complex sounds, it’s the whole point behind baby sign: So they can tell you that no they aren’t hungry they want their teddy. Doesn’t benefit language skills, it does reduce frustration (you might figure), bonds to their caregiver, and benefits both party’s emotional states.
Thats all well thought out and such but anyone with more than one kid will tell you that nature has a huge hand in it. You could treat the children the same and they can learn wildly different rates and have diverging interests.
This idea the parents take most of the responsibility for the achievements of their children is absurd. Its just as absurd as a head coach being praised for a victory in sports.
You don’t praise the guard rails in bumper bowling for the score at the end, thats the bowler. The guard rails just kept some of the worst outcomes from happening.
This idea the parents take most of the responsibility for the achievements of their children is absurd.
There’s also the flip-side of that attitude. It sure must feel nice for parents to be able to congratulate themselves when their kid excels, but what about when their kid has a disability or a developmental impairment? Who is responsible then?
It’s easy to be a parent when your kid acts and responds the way you want them to. Parents of neurodivergent kids can go above and beyond for their children, yet despite that they’ll still be given dirty looks and treated like pariahs when their overstimulated child has a public meltdown.
Kids aren’t raw lumps of clay that parents can mold to perfect shape. The best any parent can do is guide them toward success.
Coaches do have quite a large impact on teams, they’re the ones who study the opponent, formulate strategies, and then translate that into a training regimen.
In so far as being a kid is playing sportsball the coach is primarily the genome, then with some distance culture (takes a village and everything), and then the parents. You can praise a parent for having the wherewithal to introduce their kid to spaced repetition software, you can’t praise them for the kid feeling inclined to learn six languages before the age of 14 that was all the genome spotting a niche, adapting a suitable individual to serve a role by making it excited.
Yeah I don’t mean to imply that coaches or parents have no affect, just that they are commonly overstated.
Unless you happen to be the coach of my cities football (us) team, then that coach is a psycho and is single handedly responsible for losing last playoffs.
I guess thats sort of like a bad parent who tries to force stuff on their kids.
Can’t expect nerds to have the social intelligence to understand that.
Because there’s a ton of research that we adapted to do it for good reasons:
Infants between 6 and 8 months of age displayed a robust and distinct preference for speech with resonances specifying a vocal tract that is similar in size and length to their own. This finding, together with data indicating that this preference is not present in younger infants and appears to increase with age, suggests that nascent knowledge of the motor schema of the vocal tract may play a role in shaping this perceptual bias, lending support to current models of speech development.
Stanford psychologist Michael Frank and collaborators conducted the largest ever experimental study of baby talk and found that infants respond better to baby talk versus normal adult chatter.
TL;DR: Top parents are actually harming their kids’ developmental process by being snobs about it.
You can also just talk normally to your kids without being a snob about anything.
Two notes from my actual coursework in education and psych; first, baby talk exists for a reason but it’s the singasong voice that matters most, especially when they’re picking up sounds. The funny thing there is you can say absolutely terrible things in a singasong voice and they will love it and remember it better.
Second, the arse in the example isn’t actually all the way wrong, using vocabulary is important especially in that second and third year. I forget the author but there’s some studies that show preschool vocabulary is directly related to parental education and they found it’s because of the vocab the parents use. We’re taking tens of thousands more words learned. Too bad I can’t remember the author, just that it was four letters (and since leaving academia, my zotero is long gone).
You are correct. I majored in educational psychology and this language development in children has always been a special interest of mine.
Baby talk is like beacon to the baby, it tells them that “This is for YOU, pay attention!”. The baby hears and learns the intonations, patterns and the rhythms of the language. It’s importance cannot be downplayed.
A toddler can learn ~50 new words every day, so using normal speech is naturally important as well. But there is no need to try to overdo it. The mind of a small child is a massively powerful and superfocused “learning machine”, although it isn’t often apparent in their behaviour ;)
Reading to children is especially beneficial to language development. It enriches the vocabulary and introduces common patterns and rhythms of expression. And the pictures in books help to create connections between ideas and words.
The pace of language development is highly individual and forcing it is most likely useless. Children will learn what they can, at their own pace.
Every one of my own children were able to use polynomial sentences and past and future tenses before they were three. We never tried to accelerate their learning in any way, they just picked it up. On the other hand, my friend’s kid did the normal baby talk phase and then remained completely mute until the age of four. One day he just opened up and said to her mom in a clear voice: “Mom, could you give me some milk, I’m thirsty.” And he spoke normally ever since.
One advantage of quick language development is it’s effect on memory. A child that learns complex language skills early is more likely to form lasting memories of their early childhood. It may be that the memories can be stored more effectively and recalled more easily when the child is able to bind the experiences to words that can be used to express them.
This is a very fascinating subject.
Me, a chinese that only use one syllable word for my first 6 years: ._.
Ma?
I’d never really thought about until now, but do Chinese (specifically mandarin speaking) 3 year olds use Ma in place of the English speaking equivalent of “why” (repeated ad nauseum until the adult being questioned snaps!)?
Well, I’m 42, and talking outloud exhausts me.
Having been a teacher for a few years, yes talking all day loud enough to be heard over a classroom is very tiring. But I tend to have a voice that is powerful and carries well.
Even though I’m retired, my Wife still asks me to “Use your inside voice please” sometimes.
I was non-verbal for almost the first five years, so good luck with that mister “parent of the year”.
I don’t do baby talk because I just don’t like it. Not to babies not to animals.
I do find baby talk irritating, but to each their own. As long as they don’t say anything to me for no baby talking I won’t say anything for those who baby talk.
But I will just say that I’m under the impression that baby talk is done more for the talker wanting to talk like that, rather that for the listener to have a easier understanding, as I was always understood the same without baby talking and just trying to use simpler words for smaller kids but without that cartoon voice.
I always thought baby talk was just to get the baby to laugh at something silly.
I don’t either and I can say from my experience my nieces and nephews thought I was mean when they were little because everyone else did talk to them in baby voice. I even asked their parents if I had done something to scare them or hurt their feelings and they couldn’t think of anything and I was never around without their parents there. They grew out of it but it kind of sucked for a while.
My cousin does the “no baby talk” things and it has pretty good results. Their kids are sharp, but of course not in a Twittiot way. Just in a “get good grades and communicate coherently” way.
My wife and I do the same, and the results have been great. An old friend of mine met my daughter for the first time when she was two and a half, and she just walked right up to him and says, “Hello. My name is _____. It’s very nice to meet you.”
When my current two-year-old is in a bad mood, we’ll ask him if he’s being a curmudgeon, and he’ll say “No, I’m not being a curmudgeon.” They speak in full sentences because my wife and I speak in full sentences. They use big words because we use big words.
On the other hand my daughter is five now and still thinks it’s pronounced “breafixt” instead of “breakfast”, and we don’t correct her because it’s adorable. So we still have fun with it.
I don’t think any of this means they’re geniuses or are guaranteed success later in life or anything. They’re probably both gifted, but that just means they’re a couple years ahead. A four-year-old who talks like a six-year-old is a great parlor trick, but a twenty-year-old talking like a twenty-two-year-old isn’t going to give them a big leg up. That’s why I like to get all my bragging in now.
I’m in Malaysia. Our politicians and a good segment of our adults encourage this kind of chat, esp during the lockdown, for fear of offending the spouse. They call it the ‘doraemon voice’ and it’s as annoying as it sounds.
Right idea, wrong implementation. Try both making only cat noises.
Damn
Once they become teenagers, they mostly communicate through grunts and whines regardless.
ted was triggered
