Speech...less

​

I love talking to parents. Parenting does not come with a handbook. There is no right way or wrong way. Just whichever that works for the child and the family. 

​

There are children who look to parents for confirmation before touching a toy during visits in our play room, there are children who tears down the tent the moment they set foot into our play room. It is always very interesting for me to observe. There are parents who are laid-back and there are parents who jumps in to save mostly other people's child or property from being explored on their child's first visits. 

​

I noticed in particular, how a primary care-giver talks to a child makes a world of difference in how far along a child's vocabulary, speech and understanding of the language goes. Recently, i met a parent who is an educator looking for a place for his two year old son. His son has a wonderful array of single word vocabulary! Curious as he is, he explores the new environment confidently. His parents would speak to him almost like a narrative way whether he responds or not. Not a word of baby talk. I guess that is how this little two year old amassed such an astounding set of words. Of course, each children master skills and reach milestones in their own time. It was a little light bulb moment for me, remembering how my daughter's grandparents used to coo and make meaningless sounds at her while i run a monologue. "Oh goodness! It raining so hard outside. It's pouring! Just look at how the wind is blowing. Look!" Yes, i used to talk. A lot. Maybe that is why she now talks. A lot. 

 

Spoken words are made from building blocks from sounds we are exposed to. Understanding the meaning of words and matching it to the sound is natural and intuitive to the way young children. The more exposure they have to different languages, the more synapses and connections their brains wire. But when it is lacking meaning, where there is no context... does the brain retain the information? Most likely not. Judging from how she cannot remember a word of French nor Arabic she used to learn for two years before we came back to Malaysia. I will bet that if we were to speak French and Arabic at home... it would be a different story!  

​

Speech, much like walking, sitting, pincer grip and pencil grip... each in their own time but we as parents can always set a conducive environment. Like i always say in our lesson planning, "we need to set the children up for success." Be it setting age-appropriate activity where they can master with a little effort and practise or make it a "YES!" environment by putting items we do not want children to handle out of reach so that it lessens the "no" we utter.   

​

​

Eleanor Lee