The intersection of culture with parenting has been on my mind ever since Maya was born. I’ve written about it a few times already. Today, I read an article on NYT titled Parents Need to Tune In and Engage a Young Child With Talk that once again reminded me of it. The article exhorts parents to engage verbally with their children, because it is good for the children’s language development. If we don’t talk to our kids, they’ll miss out on social and verbal cues and this negatively impacts development. Some quotes from the article:
“‘Talk to your baby whenever you have the chance,’ the American Medical Association advises parents.”
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“Help expand your child’s vocabulary by talking about what is done with various objects or why a particular food helps to build healthy bodies.”
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“Count the steps as you go up or down. My twin grandsons’ math skills flourished long before they could speak in sentences because they live in a third-floor walk-up.”
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“And you can’t introduce books too early. I remember my niece at 3 months paying rapt attention as her mother “read” picture books to her, pointing out objects, their colors and what the characters were doing.”
I was left thinking that if I didn’t talk or read to Maya all the time, she’d be somehow deficient in her verbal and social skills as she grew up. I think that if I hadn’t read as much as I have, I’d feel the pressure to talk to her all the time. And if I didn’t, I’d feel less of a parent, that I’d somehow failed her.
To get a different perspective, let’s turn to Meredith Small’s “Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape The Way We Raise Our Children”, her excellent follow-up to the brilliant, insightful, “Our Babies, Ourselves”, which I’ve written about before.
Small says that anthropologists and other scientists who have studied children and language acquisition across cultures have found that children employ a variety of strategies to start speaking, and that all these strategies work fine. Some examples of these differences:
- The Gusii of Northern Kenya think that spending as much time as the Westerners do, talking to the children, molds the children to be selfish and self-centered adults. Recognizing from experience that children speak fine without talking to them incessantly, they don’t spend much time talking to them, but carry their children everywhere and thus immerse them in a sea of adult interactions all the time.
- Similarly, the Kaluli people of New Guinea live in a non-literate society and instead of talking to the child, face the baby towards others and speak for the non-verbal baby in a three-way conversation. Again, the baby is carried everywhere and is awash in conversations all the time.
In the 1950s, when behaviorism ruled the roost, linguists believed that speaking was a learned ability, that children learned to speak by listening to others. Then along came Noam Chomsky who revolutionized linguistics with a convincing argument that language is innate, biological and that we’re hard-wired from birth to speak. Steven Pinker, a leading linguist and science writer says that children instinctively know things about language that no one could have taught them. For example, Patricia Kuhl, a major figure in the study of language acquisition has conducted research that demonstrate that infants as young as 18 weeks are sophisticated in the visual aspects of speech. An infant is shown say two pictures with identical faces, but one making a silent “aah” vowel sound and another making a silent “eee” vowel sound. The infant is then made to hear one of the two vowel sounds i.e. “aah” or “eee”. Infants are shown to stare longer at the picture that corresponds to the vowel sound they’re hearing. Another example that kids know about language without being taught is the ease with which they construct plurals of new words.
While there are several theories about why we as a species acquired language, the predominant one is that language is a tool for socialization, one that takes the place of grooming that other apes use. This theory is borne out by observations that the key for an infant to acquire language is to be exposed to it. And not any exposure will do, it has to be live adults communicating. It cannot be a TV or DVD edutainment program that purports to teach the infants new words or new languages. Andrew Meltzoff, another prominent researcher in the field of infant development is quoted in Parenting Inc.: “From what I’ve seen of the science, there isn’t a tape in the world that can teach a nine-month old baby how to read. It goes against everything we know about the evolution of language in human behavior”.
It is well known that children from rich verbal enviroments tend to possess a larger vocabulary. But this comes at a much later stage in development. Statements such as: “And you can’t introduce books too early. I remember my niece at 3 months paying rapt attention as her mother “read” picture books to her, pointing out objects, their colors and what the characters were doing.” from the NYT article are without basis, according to current research.
But environment does play a critical role in language development. A tragic example of failed language development due to a severely malnourished environment comes from the sad story of a child named Genie. She was locked in a room alone, chained to a potty chair, from the age of 18 months by her mentally retarded father. She was never spoken to or allowed to speak. She eventually escaped from this prison with the help of her (also mentally challenged) mother, when she was thirteen years old. Despite being exposed to language at this stage, her verbal skills never progressed beyond that of a child. Five word sentences is the most that she can make. Stories such as Genie’s sear my mind.
Language is a prism that affects how we view the world and how we construct the world, said Edward Sapir, an anthropologist cum linguist. This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and after spending some time in the dustbin, is undergoing a revival thanks to the new work conducted by linguists such as Sara Boroditsky. Small agrees with this hypothesis and says that a society’s idea of identity informs the form of verbal coaching that occurs. In Western societies where an individual is considered paramount, nuclear families give rise to the dyadic conversations discussed in the NYT article. Among the Kaluli, an egalitarian society, life is considered to be a multifaceted interaction and so mothers involve children indirectly in conversations with others rather than talking one-on-one with them.
As a reflection of societal norms, language is one important way children learn about gender and status norms sanctioned by the culture. Small says that studies have shown that in the West, fathers speak differently to the children compared to the mothers. About thirty percent of a father’s speech consists of imperatives such as “Do this” or “Don’t do that” and speak that way more with boys than girls. Western mothers tend to talk in longer sentences to the children and talk the same way with both boys and girls. Children mimiced the adults with boys tending to use imperatives and commands. One study found that two year olds were aware of this gender-specific use of language.
When we went to the pediatrician for Maya’s 15th month checkup, she didn’t seem too pleased that Maya didn’t speak any legible words. Despite our nonchalance at this news, Shanthala and I were a little concerned if Maya had any problems. Articles such as the one in NYT exacerbate the concern by throwing guilt into the mix. I remember asking several parents at what age their kids spoke and resting easy when one of them said that their son spoke only when he was two.
In such a culture, books such as Judith Rich Harris’ “Nurture Shock” which I’ve written about earlier, make sense. A lot of culture gets passed on as gospel by the medical association. It is not that parents don’t matter, it is that the issues over which the parenting style is considered paramount are not so.
The NYT article quotes a speech and language specialist, Randi Jacoby: “Reward your little one’s communicative attempts with your heightened attention to his/her conversation. Be prepared to put down your cellphone and look them squarely in the eye as they share their thoughts with you.”
Now, that is something I can agree with. Not because it benefits the verbal development of the child, but because we teach them that when conversing, paying full attention and listening is important, that talking to a person, a child, is more important than talking on a cell phone. Given how facile it is to be focused on the cell phone or the laptop, being mindful of interacting fully with the child may set a tone for how they listen and talk, not how soon they talk.
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