Baby Talk

A few weeks ago my mother-in-law sent me a clip from Good Morning America regarding the importance of talking to your baby. Studies show that a child's success in school is related to how much parents talk to that child, which is not particularly surprising. What is surprising is that experts recommend you say 17,000 words to your child every day. That's a lot of words! Even before I had a baby I rarely spoke 17,000 words a day. The clip also highlighted a product invented by a presumably OCD mom that clips on to your baby and counts the number of words he hears each day, kind of like a pedometer for words. If my SAT prep serves me correctly, I believe that would be verbometer or a logometer, but this mom called her device LENA (Language Environment Analysis).

After watching this story I became semi-obsessed with the 17,000 words. Not obsessed enough to invent a verbometer, but obsessed enough to worry every time I sat surreptitiously reading the newspaper while Baby M banged his toy bus on the floor. I wondered if I should be reading the paper out loud. But wouldn't that break his concentration? I tried increasing the number of children's books I read to Baby M but, newly mobile, he was not very interested in sitting around listening to me read. Every book I pulled out he either grabbed and chewed or grabbed and started ripping apart. I mentioned the 17,000 words to a friend of mine and she, being much more practical than me, immediately calculated that given the number of hours her son is awake, she would have to say about 28 words every minute to meet the goal. She then counted the number of words in her son's favorite book (she is also perhaps a little more obsessive than me) and determined that she reads 1400 words in about 10 minutes. Given 40 minutes of reading time plus some good narration of her daily activities, maybe she could pull it off.

The only book I read daily to Baby M is Goodnight Moon, which has 300 words. He is also a fan of Hello Bee, Hello Me with a paltry 25 words. I do try to narrate my day, but I've realized I don't do a whole lot. Most of my day is spent watching Baby M do stuff, which I suppose I could narrate-- "Here you are chewing my flip flop", "On look you're banging a spoon on the floor." Sometimes he'll watch me unload the dishwasher and I can actually get quite a few words out of that. The other thing I've noticed is that I frequently just mimic what Baby M says. I think I read mimicry is good for his self-esteem, but maybe he will end up thinking "blah-bli- phtttt- blap" is a word. Maybe he already does. So I'm becoming more conscious of the words I say to Baby M. I find myself often saying "I see you Baby," since Baby M likes to crawl off to another room and then turn around to make sure I am still watching. If I stopped there, that would be fine; "see" and "baby" are perfectly good words, but no, I don't stop there. You see, I cannot say "I see you Baby" without following it with "shaking that ass." Ten to one Baby M's first word is "ass".