Baby Talk and 50-cent Words:

How We Talk to Kids

One thing I notice as I retype my old journals from more than 20 years ago is that I often used pretty big words when talking to the kids. In my fifth journal entry—and remember, at the time Camille and Mindy were just five years old, and Lindsey was only three—I answered the kids' questions with words like camouflaged and pigments and chlorophyll. Later in the day, I used the word estimation and told them that the papers they held were not called tickets, but instead were receipts.

What gives with all the 50-cent words?

Well, to be honest, I talk a fair bit, so I imagine that I used a whole lot of smaller words, too. I used some of those smaller words to explain words, when I thought the kids needed an explanation—apparently I identified guess as a pretty good synonym for estimation, for example—and sometimes a picture we were looking at or an activity we were doing explained my vocabulary choices.

Fundamentally, I thought that I should at least try to use the “right” word for an object or phenomenon, no matter how little my kids were. Here are two anecdotes that illustrate how I reacted when somebody suggested taking a different tack...something that some might call talking at the kids' “level” but that I would call “talking down.”

The large gray animal that shall remain unnamed...

Before I even had kids to not talk down to, I was an editor at an educational publishing company. The editing staff worked very hard to get interesting, factual, clearly written prose in our textbooks, but there was a last step we had to take: we had to put the text through a “readability formula” to determine its “grade level.”

This was before computers had revolutionized the world—there were a few huge computers down in accounting, but we did our tasks with electric typewriters and calculators—so figuring out readability involved grunt work: we had to count up the number of words, the number of sentences, and the number of words that were not on a special list. A few calculations later, we came up with a number that was supposedly the grade level of the reading matter.

If the grade level was too high (and it always was), we had to play around with sentence length and so forth to bring the reading matter to the level it “had” to be.

The thing that got to me was that some lazy editors suggested using “easier” words to replace the words that weren't on that special list. That, they said, would make the text easier to read.

But it almost never did! On a page about elephants, with a wonderful picture of an elephant front-and-center, it does NOT make the text in any way better or easier to read to substitute “large gray animal” for “elephant.”

(As you can guess, the word animal was on that special list of "easy" words, but elephant was not.)

I fought against such insane changes. Making text awkward and unnatural, just to get it to come out "right" in a readability formula, is bad for publishers and for kids, I maintained.

Things should be called by their proper names.

The large black-and-white animal that shall remain unnamed...

Around the time that I was writing this journal (when the kids were about 3 and 5), we went to visit Sea World with another family. The dad of the other family was a marine biology teacher, so I was excited to pick up some of his expertise on the sea animals we would view that day. Imagine my shock when, at the beginning of the day, he totally misidentified “Shamu,” the killer whale.

We'd barely sat down to watch the Shamu show when the huge orca jumped out of the water and then crashed down again with one of those audience-soaking splashes. Like everyone else, all our kids were electrified by the sight of all that power. And into the silence that followed their gasps, my teacher friend asked the kids, “Did you see the big fish?”

More gasps from my husband and me.

“John!” I protested. “You know Shamu isn't a fish!”

He just shrugged, keeping his eyes on Shamu's next trick. “They're three!” he said, referring to his small son on his lap, and my daughter on mine. “What do you want me to say, 'Look at the big mammal?'”

Like little kids would have soooooooo much difficulty with a two-syllable word! On the other hand, I could think of a perfectly good one-syllable word he could have (and should have) used:

“How about, 'Look at the whale?'” I asked.

Like I said, things should be called by their right names. There may be many different correct names in any one situation—in this case, it could have been Shamu, orca, killer whale, whale, or even mammal...

But it most definitely should not have been fish!

Not that I was some sort of perfect paragon of a parent...

I notice that I also blew it a bit. I see from my journal that, when interacting with the kids' dress-up play, I used country names like Thailand and India with the older girls but a continent's name (South America) with my youngest.

I don't think it was a terrible misstep, since there were times when we talked about the various countries of South America and Africa (aside from anything else, we had these cool continent-map placemats that we often talked about while we ate). But I do think it's a problem when adults constantly conflate countries and continents. After years of hearing things like, “What do you want to write your report on? England, France, Africa, India, or maybe Australia?” it is understandable that kids would think of Africa as an undifferentiated blob on the globe.

How it all turned out

The upshot of my choice not to “talk down” to the kids was that my kids had large speaking vocabularies.

I often noticed that other people were always making snap-judgments, quickly coming to the conclusion that my kids were very intelligent. (As homeschoolers, the kids had no grades or test scores to brag about, so I'm certainly glad that people didn't immediately assume that they were unintelligent!) As the girls got older, it became apparent that the main reason people assumed they were smart was because of those large speaking vocabularies.

Little kids are brilliant at learning language, so using big “50-cent” words around them tends to work out just fine.

On the other hand...

It may seem completely contrary to the point I've made here to say that I eagerly engaged in “baby talk” when my kids were, you know, babies. I used super short sentences, lots of inflection and repetition, a higher tone than normal, a more sing-songy delivery—the whole nine yards. It came naturally to me to talk to my infants this way.

It goes without saying that I wasn't running around mis-identifying things for my babies. I wasn't calling airplanes birds, for example, because I imagined that two-syllable words were “too hard.”

If I can recall correctly, though, I did a whole lot of point-and-label. “Look, Mindy! [pointing] A plane! See the plane?”

Some people think that baby talk is disrespectful to babies, a form of “talking down.” It never occurred to me to think about it, to be honest—like I said, I just did what seemed natural—but in recent years I have read that baby talk (AKA caretaker speech, infant-directed talk, and motherese) actually helps babies learn language and, perhaps, helps both mental development and emotional attachment.

Respect your kids. Trust your gut.

Obviously, there is no one “right” way to talk to kids. Ultimately, we have to trust our parental instincts and our children's responses to guide us. I believe that, if we truly respect the fact that our kids are their own unique and valuable selves, we will tend to be respectful as we speak to them, however we do so, at any age.

Testing...Testing...

In my last journal entry, I see that I was disquieted by Mindy's questions about what number comes after 10, after 20, after 30, and so forth.

I wondered, way back then, why she didn't already know that stuff, or why she couldn't figure out some of it on her own.

Looking back on that journal entry from the space of more than twenty years, I can confidently state that Mindy had figured out most or all of that stuff. She surely knew the words eleven, twelve, and so forth, and their order, but she probably had not seen or written these words very often. With the need to match up words like eleven with their numeric form, she probably created a mental model of how the numbers past 10 worked (1-1, 1-2, 1-3, and so on) and was testing her mental model against reality in the quickest-and-easiest way open to her—by checking with Mom.

Why am I so confident about that, now? Because over the years, Mindy showed herself to be quite good at mathematical thinking—she demonstrated an almost instinctive grasp of many concepts I had to grapple with to learn—and because she also showed herself to be quite a careful, cautious learner. She often sat back and watched others do things and only began to do them herself when she could do them right. She wasn't particularly the type to rummage around a topic, making messes and learning from mistakes—instead, she was the type to absorb-absorb-absorb, and then plunge in with competence.

A wise, grandmotherly type of woman I knew when Mindy was young said she called that sort of learner a "watcher."

Strangely, the pattern isn't true of some of Mindy's pursuits in her teen and adult years. She mucks about with computers, trying things out without the fear that tends to paralyze people of older generations. She rarely looks at manuals or instructions. Instead, she just experiments—with everything from physical set-up, to program features, to programming itself. I think that, in the case of computers, Mindy can quickly get the feedback she craves from the machines themselves—what she tries either works or doesn't, and she quickly reacts to the latter situation with a variety of new ideas about what might end up working.

If we can trust my journal entry, I reacted calmly and even patiently to her requests for information. She had confidence in my answers, and confidence in our small group—it was “safe” to ask her questions and test her theories.

If I didn't already know this about Mindy, I soon learned that she really gets pleasure out of organized concepts and checking things off in her well-ordered mind. I think that on that day so long ago, doing a dot-to-dot puzzle, she got a little click of satisfaction each time her guess turned out to be correct.

She was a watcher...a builder of mental models...a tester. She figured out an answer, then tested it against reality. Always testing, testing.

Journal Entry 5

Thursday,
September 17

Camille arrives this morning seeming very droopy. I realize that she (1) has to get up earlier than my girls, and (2) has to get dressed / brushed / ready / and out of the house early, too.

Luckily, she soon cheers up when I offer to read to all three girls. We sit down and read Who Sank the Boat? and The Puppet Theater Fairy Tales.

The girls begin to play, as they often do, with dolls. This time it's Cabbage Patch dolls, because Camille has brought hers over to play with the others' dolls. The three girls carefully dress Caroline, Carrie, and Baby Lynette.

Suddenly the fully clothed dolls are left on the floor, unplayed with—and the girls are busy dressing themselves. Actually, they aren't “dressing” so much as “dressing-up”: wrapping themselves with long swaths of cloth of all colors and patterns.

“We are children from other lands,” Camille tells me, arranging her drapery artistically.

“Oh! Cool! What other lands?” I ask.

She looks blank and turns to the others, who just keep on winding more cloth around and around.

“Mmm...” I say. “Camille, you look like you're Thai. From Thailand?” I suggest.

She turns back to me with a serious face. “Yes, that's what I am,” she solemnly agrees.

“Where do you think I'm from?” Mindy asks.

“Gee...you look Indian, from India.”

“Yes, that's what I am,” she says with a huge smile. I realize that she has reused Camille's exact words. We are beginning to sound like one of those kids' books that uses repetition like verse.

I turn to Lindsey, who is wearing bright woven fabrics: “Gee...you look South American,” I tell her. (I don't know why I went all continental on that one. Just because she's young and wouldn't know Peru?)

“Yes, that's what I am,” she says, instinctively playing along with the repetition motif.

The girls move away from me and interact with each other, three strangers from three different lands. I start unloading dishes, then move to sort some laundry. The latter task puts me near their play, and I realize that the girls have created some elaborate plot in which somebodies' fathers are dying.

I don't know what that's all about.

That reminds me that Mindy has suddenly been “into” males. She told me last night, “When men are in the house, I like to follow them around and be with them, more than I like women.”

This was startling to me, and I asked the natural question: “Men? What men?”

Mindy looked up at me. “Daddy and Grandpa, of course!”

Yeah. Of course. What other men could there be?

Remembering that conversation with a smile, I take a load of laundry out to the garage. When I get back into the house, Mindy asks me to comb her hair in a “fancy Indian style.”

G-ulp. I'm not that good with hair. And I have no idea what a fancy Indian hairstyle would look like!

Still, I try my best, and Mindy seems completely satisfied with the half-up style with pinned-up-swirls. Naturally, I instantly get two more hairstyling “clients.” Funnily enough, Camille and Lindsey don't ask for “fancy Thai” and “fancy South American” styles (which, honestly, is a very good thing for my lack of hair knowledge)—they want just what Mindy has. I battle with a knot in Lindsey's hair, with bobby pins and hair clips, and with covered elastic bands—but eventually I triumph over hair and hair apparatus and am looking at three “fancy” coiffures.

Mindy reminds me of a cartoon she doesn't watch but that she catches glimpses of as we tune in the next show, Muppet Babies. Mindy says, “Remember that show, Mom? The horse in that show is MAGNIFICENT!” I can hear the capital letters in her voice. Mindy goes on: “I'm going to dress this horse just like him!”

She gets out one of her toy horses with long lavender hair. I notice that, although her play with hairstyling and lavender horses usually assumes that the horses are female, this time she's using “he” and “him.” Very interesting.

The other girls get out horses, too, and all three begin to comb and adorn horse tails and manes. Mindy holds up her finished product, saying, “Oh, do you look MAGNIFICENT!” Then she turns to another horse who is still languishing in the toy box.

Camille suggests, “Let's sing that Mr. Rogers' song 'I Like to Tame My Time,' okay?”

Another TV show we don't watch. Mindy doesn't know the song but agrees to sing it and struggles to follow along.

—Oops! I guess she does know the song a little (from somewhere), because she is now leading!

After the song is over, Camille proclaims, “I want my horse to look magnificent... beautiful... cute... magnificent!”

All I can think of is how magnificently beautiful (and cute) these girls are.

***

When a substantial number of their toy horses are styled, the kids lose interest. I help them pose their Cabbage Patch dolls and fancy-haired horses and then clean up the combs and clips mess. As soon as we're done with all that, Mindy makes a break for the dinosaur “activity books” I had laid out on a table, ready for the moment when the kids wonder “what now?”

Soon all three are coloring dinosaurs. Camille chooses a crayon carefully—lemon yellow—but then takes the time to ask if that particular dinosaur was, in fact, yellow.















So we have a rather long conversation about dinosaur colors. I get out some of the books we've been reading, and the kids talk about the colors that the illustrators used. We talk about the fossilized remains of dinosaurs that scientists use to learn about them. “Even the few times we have a print made from where the skin pressed into mud,” I say, “that doesn't tell us the color of the skin, does it? Like a footprint in sand is the color of the sand, not the foot.” The girls “get” that, and conclude that we have no way of knowing what color the various dinosaurs were.

We discuss how illustrators and toy makers decide on dinosaur colors, and I say something about some modern reptiles having coloration that helps them blend in with their surroundings, so they can hide. “Like green lizards and snakes that are camouflaged among plants,” I explain.

Camille, looking at an illustration of bold purple-and-orange dinosaurs, innocently asks, “Were plants purple and orange back in dinosaur times?”

So then I talk a bit about plant pigments that absorb the sunlight that plants need to make food, and how some of these pigments are red or purple, but most are green. I casually use the word chlorophyll when talking about the green pigments, and it doesn't faze the kids a bit, but who knows how much of all of this they will actually absorb?

In the meantime, the girls have some pretty brightly colored dinos emerging from their pages—including Camille's lemon-yellow dinosaur!

Mindy has moved on to doing a dot-to-dot picture. She asks me what comes after 9 (surely she knows already!?), and I calmly say ten while pointing to the number 10. “And after that comes eleven,” I say, pointing to the number 11. “What do you think comes after 11?” Mindy easily draws to the 12-dot and is merrily on her way—but then pauses again to ask me what comes after 19. “Two-O, which is the number twenty. Then 21.” She easily deals with 21 through 29 and then pauses to ask— —you guessed it!— “What comes after 29?” I explain, still patient, but I'd love it if she figured it out on her own!

As they color and dot-to-dot and help dinosaurs find their way through mazes, the girls sing songs from “Free to Be You and Me.”

“Let's play Dino Lotto,” Mindy suggests. All three girls find it easy to find matching dinosaurs (and other prehistoric creatures), but Lindsey starts to get a little upset when Camille and Mindy fill up their lotto cards before she can hers. I distract her with a toy she really likes right now, a pegboard.

“Now some books,” Camille suggests. We read two books about dinosaurs and then a library book called Tell Me a Trudy. Lindsey plays with the pegboard while we read, but when I finish the Trudy book, she announces that she is hungry.

I make a quick, nutritious snack for my two girls and finally coax Camille into eating breakfast. While they eat, I put away the library books, dino lotto game, and dinosaur activity books. What dinosaur-related item should I put out next? I consult a list I had brainstormed into existence a while ago, see a measuring activity, and think, “Good plan.”

I go out to the garage and find the metal measuring tape. I put it, a ball of yarn, and the sidewalk chalk onto a table, and Mindy's interest is instantly roused. “What's that?”

“A measuring tape and some yarn and the chalk,” I answer.

“Yeah, but what's it for?”

“Well, after you guys finish eating, and we clean up, you'll see.”

Lickety split, I soon had 3 filled bellies, a cleaned-up table, and the girls' attention.

“What's that stuff for?” Camille repeated.

“Well, remember we keep talking about how huge and long the dinosaurs were?” I ask the girls.

“Yeah!”

“Well, we keep reading that scientists think supersaurus was about 100 feet long, but I was wondering if we know how long that really is? So I thought we'd find out. And that means going outside, out front.”

Enthusiasm greets this suggestion, and we go out to the sidewalk. I make a mark near the corner and stand right on that mark, and I direct the kids to each take a piece of chalk and walk away from me in a straight line. When they think they've gone 100 feet, they should make a mark on the sidewalk and then write their name by their estimation. (I explain that estimation means guess.)

The girls walk and walk and keep turning back to look at me. Finally each of them stops and makes her mark.

“Are you going to guess, Mommy?” Lindsey asks.

So I walk to a spot—carefully NOT counting out paces, because I just want to see what my intuition tells me is the right length—and I mark a line and my name on the sidewalk.

“Now let's check our estimates,” I say.

We use the measuring tape to mark the yarn every ten feet (I have to run into the house to get masking tape and a Sharpie pen), and then we carefully use our jumbo yarn-tape-measure to mark 100 feet.

It turns out, we were all pretty far off—our guesses were all way too long!

Once we marked the 100-foot length, I consulted some notes I'd made and did some more quickie measurements and marks on the sidewalk. Then I take the kids on a “Dinosaur Walk.” As we walk along the sidewalk together, I say, “This is the supersaur's head. Here is its neck...keep walking...keep walking! Okay, now we're to the body...still the body. And here is the tail...more tail...and still more tail!”

The kids love it! They run inside to get some dolls, then they take turns leading their dolls on the same dino tour, sticking pretty close to the words I'd used even though their proportions are a little bit different. They clearly get the main idea that sauropods had loooooooong necks and loooooooong tails.

As we walk back to the house, the girls see a telephone pole and pretend it is a looong sauropod neck. They crane their necks to look up at the “dinosaur's head.”

Suddenly this changes into a game of “I Spy,” which we play for several turns. Mindy and Lindsey seem most intent on noticing little natural items that will stump the rest of us, and Camille seems intent on making it a word game. The game starts off with a rhyme, “I spy with my little eye...” before getting into the guessing-game part: “something green!” But she keeps up the rhyming, the sillier the better. “A green machine? A green...a green thing? A green bean? Oh! A green queen!”

* * *

Home again, the older two girls decide to sew. They get out some fabric and their school scissors. I decide I had better supervise and bring some laundry over to fold while I keep my eye on things.

Mindy says that she is going to sew “a dress for Caroline and overalls for my little bear.” Camille states that she will make a costume for Baby Lynette. (Carrie, Camille's Cabbage Patch doll, is languishing nearby, no doubt waiting for someone to offer to sew something for her!)

Lindsey shows no interest in cutting fabric and sewing. Instead, she has grabbed the plastic fold-up ruler that came with a toy tool bench and is “measuring” everything.

The girls talk about measuring, and Camille asks to borrow the ruler. She then measures Caroline and Carrie. She passes the ruler over to Mindy, who also measures and compares the two dolls.

“They are the same!” Camille states correctly. “That means they are born on the same day,” she concludes...not so correctly.

I open my mouth to challenge her logic, but Mindy is answering, so I shut my mouth again and wait to see what she says.

“I guess so....:” Mindy starts. “When was Carrie's birthday, Camille?”

Camille says that her doll's birthday was in May.

“Well, mine's is in June,” Mindy starts to reply. “Wait!—Mom, when is Caroline's birthday?”

Cabbage Patch dolls arrive with a name and a birthday already printed on the adoption papers, so there is one “right” answer, and I provide it: “November 1.”

Camille says, “Oh, Carrie's is December 1.”

I'm confused as to Carrie's birthday being in May AND December. But I shrug off all concerns about logic because I'm so pleased that Lindsey has started to help me match socks and fold laundry. With her help, I quickly finish the load.

Lindsey gets some dolls to play with. I take the laundry into the bedrooms and put it away, then hurry back to supervise the sewing project.

I chuckle when I hear Camille lecture her doll, “Carrie, you're only five—you don't know much—I haven't taught you. Wait until you're six!”

Even funnier, a few minutes later, is Camille spouting off about her doll's desire to have more than one costume for Halloween. “It's frustrating!” Camille complains to us. She turns back to her doll, saying, “Carrie, please, would you stop all this nonsense?”

* * *

I have to run a few errands, so we all get ready to go out. We go to the copy shop and then stop by the grocery store to buy a few needed items. I tell each girl that she can choose one piece of fruit to buy and eat.

Camille asks, “Can I choose fruit juice?” She holds up one of those special individual-serving all-natural fruit juices, and I say sure. Possibly a mistake, because Mindy and Lindsey immediately decide they want juice, too.

Sigh. Less fiber, more sugar (fructose), and probably fewer vitamins. Oh, well.

I give each girl money so she can buy her own juice, and then I pay for my larger order. As we go out to the car, Mindy asks if she can keep the ticket.

“Ticket?” I ask.

“This ticket,” she says.

“Oh, the receipt,” I answer.

“What's a receipt?” Lindsey asks.

“Those little bits of paper are called receipts,” I explain. “And they show that we paid for the things we bought. They're sort of like proof.” I turn to Mindy. “Yes, you can keep your receipt if you want.”

When we get home, the girls drink their juice and rinse the bottles. Then the two older girls resume their “sewing projects,” which now involve draping and knotting, plus some large-scale stitching with needle and thread.

Lindsey has found the T-rex model and is trying to talk to Camille through it. Camille doesn't answer. After several attempts, Camille finally responds: “I won't talk to you, because you're bad.”

We discuss the word bad in relation to behavior, and I ask if meat eaters doing what they have to do, to stay alive, are really being bad. Lindsey defends T-rex, saying that he can't help what he is. (I notice that, in this world of mostly-females, T-rex is a “he.”)

In the meantime, Lindsey is looking around for something non-upsetting to feed T-rex. “What can we feed him, Mom?” she asks.

Picture: A tyrannosaur considering behaving badly?

“Steak?” I suggest.

“Yeah!” Mindy and Lindsey both say.

Camille seems okay with a meat-eater eating steak, too. (Maybe I should've challenged the logic on this one, saying something like “Steak from a cute little cow,” but I go the easy route and let them distance meat words from animal words. I'm really being practical here—I don't want to risk Camille upsetting her parents by becoming a vegetarian at age 5, plus I don't want Camille to upset Lindsey, who is getting a bit tired at this time of the day, by continuing to call her chosen plaything “bad.”)

Picture of T-Rex, by Mindy 9-1987. The T-Rex seems to be ignoring the child and going for the tree!

Now all three girls seem to think the tyrannosaur is a good guy. The older girls are using scraps of fabric to clothe him, which involves getting out the ruler again and measuring him. Soon Lindsey informs us that he is ill. They make a call to the dino doctor to find out what to do.

Camille has rummaged through the dinosaur model box and discovered the two-headed dragon (we just don't have enough dragon models for their own box!). She has the dragon tell Mindy to go get more meat. “We're running out of meat!” she says.

It turns out that Camille's dragon is sick, too. More phone calls.

Lindsey feels that a green pillow would comfort T-rex, and we all help her use scrap fabric to make one. As he lays down on the finished product, Lindsey says, “He has mucus. He's going to die!”

The other two girls make sympathetic comments...

What with the scissors and the needles, I had to be right in the thick of the threesome a lot today, and it has given me a chance to notice how much Lindsey adds to the richness of play. When I am not so near their play, it sometimes seems that she is mostly a disruption to the older girls' pretend scenarios, because I hear more from the girls when there are problems than when there is collaboration.

The girls make a move to go outside to play. I insist on them helping to clean up the scraps of fabric, and then they race outdoors. I finish up putting away scissors, needle and thread and then sit down with my notebook to write all of this stuff down.

I don't know what they're playing outside, but I hear through the screen door the word “protoceratops.” A few minutes later, the girls go through the house and into the garage, calling back to me, “We need hammers.”

“What? Why?”

I am picturing actual tools and a whole new level of supervision, but Mindy emerges from the garage with three croquet mallets. She begins to answer my question. “We need them to dig out the fossils we found.”

Camille explains, “You and Jim are paleontologists, and we are your children.”

Mindy goes on, “And we found a bed of fossils.”

The kids have scrounged a plastic container from somewhere and return to the back yard. I see that they are hammering at the dirt with their croquet mallets, and then collecting pieces of rock in the container.

“Look at all these fossils, Mom!” Lindsey says through the screen door.

Mindy is so excited by two of her finds, she comes in to show me. “Look, Mom, dinosaur teeth!”

I ask, “Is the dinosaur a meat eater or a plant eater?”

Mindy holds up one of the rocks, which is rather round, and says, “Plant eater.” Then she holds up the other rock, which is sharp, and adds, “And a meat eater.”

A few minutes later, Maria arrives, and the girls get to tell her about the sewing projects and the sick dinosaur and dragon and the bed of fossils. Another day summarized in a few excited bursts...

But it's hard to truly explain all the rich complexity that is a day!