On early childhood development
Dooce's latest monthly bulletin reports an astonishing spurt in her daughter Leta's development:
One afternoon I was in the middle of the living room floor coloring with you when I started to write your name. You looked at the letters I had written and said out loud while pointing to each one, "L-E-T-A." Thinking that I was hearing voices in my head I wrote out my own name to see if you would recognize any other letters. Before I could even ask you what each one was you spelled out my name -- from the H-E-A to the T-H-E-R -- and then I frantically looked around the room to see who was playing this joke on me.The punchline is that just a few months ago Dooce had taken Leta to a child development specialist because they were worried that she was lagging behind, just staring off into space instead of doing stuff like kids should. It's pretty clear who had the last laugh there!
I wrote letter after letter and you identified each one. "Which one is this?"
"K."
"And this one?"
"Q."
I even tried to trick you by throwing in some numbers. "What's this letter?"
"10."
"Someone's feeding you the answers. I know you won't know this one."
"13."
Larry gave me a similar jolt yesterday (I spent the day setting up Slim's new iBook and copying her files across) when I realized that he is now speaking in proper sentences, with nouns and verbs and predicates and all that tricky grammatical stuff. How did that happen?
Slim confirmed my belief that he had made an enormous leap in speech over Christmas and New Year's, and I humbly think that I know why: he spent those weeks surrounded by adults and older children.
It's a truism that monkeys and humans learn by imitation - which requires that there is something available for us to imitate. Young children in daycare are surrounded by other young children in daycare, they hear only the babble of their age-group and the simplified language that the caregivers (hate that word) use with them. When they go home, single children of single parents (like Larry) hear more of the same. Children in large families hear adult conversations, or the half-adult conversation of their older siblings, and imitate this. It pushes their development further faster.
Before the trolling starts: the theory is not my own, I read it a few winters ago in one of my sister's Psychology Today magazines.
posted by Udge @ 09:53
3 Comments:
It makes sense that children learn what they see and hear. Why else does a parent automatically say, "Where'd you hear that?" whenever the first slip of the tongue happens and a child picks up those words we don't want them to know?
The other aspect of language development I find interesting is that receptive language skills outstrip productive language skills. This is true of adults learning a new language as well. As a consequence, one can speak to a child at a far higher level of linguistic complexity - and they'll still understand - than the level at which they can speak. It's all amazing stuff!
This is the problem with being too protective o Childhood. It teaches children to be children, instead of teaching them to become adults.
I had much older brothers, and spent much time around adults, often elderly adults, none of whom spoke down to me. My Uncle Walt talked to be about aerodynamics and engineering, and I soaked it all up. I was certainly teased as a kid, but I'm a much better educated adult than many of my acquaintance.
Anyone who has tried to learn a new language has come across the issue. I understand far more Spanish than I can speak. Recognizing words is easier than coming up with the right ones.
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