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.