Talking to Kids

"I love the way you talk to your son..."

I've been told this several times recently, and I had no idea what it meant. I really didn't know I was "doing anything" all that interesting. I also tend to be pretty wrapped up in my own life, and rarely am all that aware of what other people are doing. But after spending some time in settings around other parents of small ones, I think I have a better idea of what the people who said this meant by it. I do tend to do things a bit differently, and I guess in something as ordinary as talking to my son, this would come out as well. As to why that would be the case, I think it is a side-effect of teaching, and relates to my overall philosophy about communicating effectively with students. Parents (and other people who spend time around small children) tend to use pronounced speech patterns when communicating with infants and young children that are a bit different than what they use when communicating with other adults. It's instinctual. It usually involves the use of simplified vocabulary, a different pitch of voice (higher), increased use of questioning, and a slower rate of delivery. Popularly called "motherese", the formal term is "child directed speech". This makes sense, you don't talk to your child the same way you talk to your coworkers, and if you talked to your coworkers the same way you talk to your 2-year-old, they'd think you were batty.

Rather specifically, child-directed-speech tends to look a bit like this: The speaker usually gazes into the child's face and raises the pitch of her voice to a higher register. The speech itself features dramatic changes (low to high, from soft to loud)--in other words, it almost always sounds like someone reading aloud a dramatic story. The speaker exaggerates consonant sounds, and stretches out vowel sounds, uses shorter sentences, with few words, and uses dramatic pauses and longer wait times. It's a kind of scaffolded conversation that adults do instinctively to help children learn how to speak.

But I've noticed there's also strange but very common variations on this concept.

There's variation #1 that I call "cutesy-wutsie baby talk", where seemingly sane adults talk to children like they're brainless small fuzzy stuffed animals incapable of forming an intelligent thought. It sounds like the verbal equivalent of syrup poured over a deep-fried candy bar with a dusting of powdered sugar on top. It grates on the nerves, and frankly comes off as totally degrading...to the point where you start thinking, "If someone talked to ME that way, I'd stab my eyes out." Dramatic intonation, and simplified vocabulary, yes. Scaffolded conversation? Not so much.

Variation #2 is what I call "the dog trainer", where people talk to kids like they would a dog: lots of short bursts of one or two-word commands. "sit down." "shut up." "quit it." (these are actually the polite variations--often they're laced with profanity). Reduced speech and simple vocabulary, yes. Scaffolded conversation? Not so much.

Variation #3 is what I call "parents as peers", where parents talk to their child (you usually only see this one with an only-child) like they are a miniature adult (peer). Seriously. If you overhear the conversation it usually sounds like a verbal equivalent of the New Yorker, and tends to be a monologue (since few kids can respond/converse in this fashion). So you get a steady stream of narrative or exposition, that sounds so utterly pretentious that it's ludicrous. (Living in Portland, when I see this, I expect to see the film crew for Portlandia jump out from behind the bushes and yell "Cut!" every time I overhear this kind of dialogue in parent/child interactions.

Now let's leave the volatile world of parenting behind for a moment and jump to teaching, and how verbal communication works in that setting:

Talking to students is a bit different from talking to your own child. For one, the student/teacher relationship is a less personal kind of relationship, so it works best if most of the communication is positive in tone, brief, and relatively non-emotional in content:

"We're on page 47." (versus "Why aren't you doing your work, I told you five minutes ago to get started, let's get going buddy!") "Cool car!" (versus "Oh my goodness, that's a really wonderful red car you drew there, you are the best artist ever!") "Not a good plan." (A student is caught doing something she shouldn't be doing in class.)

According to kids, most teachers err on the side of talking a lot, maybe too much. Many have told me they appreciate the fact that I don't do that. As a teacher, you really don't have the luxury of talking one-on-one with students a lot, so you either tend to talk to all of your students at once (lecturing), or lean towards using a variety of non-verbal behaviors to show your attention. Most students seem to respond better to less verbiage (blah blah blah).

As a teacher, most of your communication is largely focused on persuading entire groups of people to cooperate and do something as a group, against all their natural inclinations, so your conversations tend to be far less personal, and more like directing traffic. It's the verbal equivalent of conducting an orchestra, so you tend to develop a number of lines that you use for the sake of efficiency, and through repetition, they develop meaning to your audience.

When you DO talk with students one-on-one, you can only do it in brief snatches, rather infrequently. So when you do have time to talk to a student one-on-one, it pays to be honest (authentic) and direct, but non-emotional (I call this "being real"--you say what you have to say, but only what's important and worth saying). Kids and teenagers hate "phony" conversations, lengthy explanations, rhetorical discussions, sermons, scoldings, advice, etc. Often non-verbal gestures work even better than words: high-fives, fist bumps, and a smile work better than flowing words of praise. Instead of nagging/lecturing, a simple shake of the head, or if necessary, "the look of death" often gets the job done nicely. (If you have some praise, and need to say something more in depth, it's often better to write a note!)

Things that do NOT work with students include telling them how they should think or feel about something, what lessons they should be learning, and giving ultimatums. Often it's best to say less, rather than more, and let them feel the weight of their mistakes and the inner joy of their successes.

Now back to the original subject, talking to one's own children:

Naturally, you can do this anyway you want, but in my own particular case, being a teacher for awhile has probably influenced how I talk to my son. For starters, I think overly-syrupy baby talk is degrading to the intelligence of children, and dehumanizing, so I don't do that with children of any age. I operate on the assumption that children almost always understand far more than they can say, so I talk to them like they are human beings with feelings, thoughts, and motivations of their own. As humans, we tend to equate intelligence with speech prowess, so the tendency to "talk down" to children, people with disabilities, and people who speak another language is very strong. Until children are talking well, conversation is difficult, and a bit one-sided, but there are ways to talk to babies that still respect their dignity as small people.

Children are small humans with feelings and ideas of their own, so I find the "dog trainer" style of speech aversive because children are cognitively much more advanced than dogs, making them worthy of complete sentences. Granted there are times when short and sweet is best, but using a variety of words and mixing short and long sentences together when speaking is helpful to a child who is still learning how to speak. I think the people who tend to use "dog trainer" style language with children do it because unconsciously they believe the child is incapable of understanding anything more advanced. You see this most often with people who are communicating with a non-verbal child (or adult), which bothers me because it's often the case that the speaker assumes the listener is mentally incapable of understanding regular speech. I have found that this is rarely the case, even with severely disabled children or adults (if you remember to give these folks longer wait time for processing verbal information, you will often find that they understand you just fine). However, even with a toddler or child who usually speaks only in one or two word phrases, you can elaborate on them, or ask questions in order to help the child develop more sophisticated sentences of his or her own.

Generally, it's good to talk to children as much as you can. Speech, like any other skill takes practice. The more adults talk to children, the more words and sentence constructions (syntax patterns) children hear (and learn to use). Before children learn to speak, this conversation will be fairly one-sided, but you can narrate your daily routines, read books, or tell stories to babies. As they get older, you can leave spaces for them to "add" to the conversation (scaffolding).

It's good to talk about all kinds of things, because the more we describe things and extend our speech about things, the more names for things and the more kinds of logical structures between ideas children learn. A good way to do this is to go for walks (and talk about the things you see out in the world), through reading books together (good for experiences and situations you don't have in your own environment), and so on. With children, speech/experience/cognition are all highly linked, so the more concepts the child is exposed to, the more speech has a context and makes sense.

I think it's important to use rich language with children, so I do that with my students, and I do that with my son. I think in both cases, it's best to use a variety of words (simple and complex), so that vocabulary development happens in a natural context. My students are always telling me I use "big words", but they don't complain about not understanding them. With my son, I use a judicious mix of simplified and more "adult" vocabulary, so that he'll be used to hearing it, so that by the time he goes to school and starts learning to read in earnest, he'll be familiar with a wide variety of words. To do this, I try to make sure I'm not overusing the same adjectives (big, pretty, etc.), and using both simplified and precise names for things (train -vs- diesel locomotive).

Other principles of communication that I use with my students (and my son) are:

Stick to the message: with boys in particular, it's often best to leave out the emotional overlay, and deliver messages directly but neutrally. For instance if my son starts throwing his toys, I usually say (in a pretty neutral fashion) something like "Those are not for throwing", or "You can throw your ball if you want to throw things." Leaving out the emotional overlay (anger) makes it more likely that he will listen and respond appropriately. In a classroom setting, it always seems to work best if you deliver most messages with a positive but neutral affect.

Judicious use of Logic: I know this doesn't work with all kids, or probably even most kids, but my son has always been a rather "logical" character, and very interested in figuring things out on his own, so a lot of times, if he can't have/do something, I will provide information on what that's the case: "If you run in the street, a car might hurt you." "If you touch that, it will hurt you." "You are welcome to do that outside where there's more room." "You need money to do that." "You have to take a bath because you got very dirty when you were playing outside." "We go to sleep because it's night time." etc, etc. It seems to greatly reduce the arguing. In a classroom setting, this works surprisingly well at reducing arguments because it's harder for kids to argue with facts/logic than ideas/preferences (although there's always a few kids who will try their best).

Input: Kids like to have input (or choices) whenever they can. Starting in toddlerhood, this becomes a real issue and often leads to dramatic power struggles and a lot of frustration on both sides. Since the urge to self-determination is impossible to extinguish, I find it works best to give kids choices (and practice making them) whenever humanly possible (they don't have to be dramatic ones--small choices seem to work wonders). In terms of communication, it means that I frequently ask my son (and students) questions that require them to make choices; if he wants to do something one way or another way (both alternatives being perfectly acceptable to me). Instead of making demands all day, you find yourself asking a lot more questions. (Note: this only works if you have a child who is capable of making choices).

Interest: the more you know about a child, the more you are aware of what they're interested in. Talking to children about their interests is a great way of building relationships and rapport. The only way to know what children are interested in is to invite conversation, and pay attention to what they have to say, and use the information in your conversations. Depending on what it is, the area of interest can be expanded into a variety of different contexts, and you can use it metaphorically to explain other ideas/concepts in a more concrete fashion. This sounds obvious, but it's amazingly effective, and sometimes hard to remember to do. In a classroom setting, it's invaluable when you have to explain difficult/abstract ideas to kids because you can compare them to things the child is already interested in.

So, I don't think there's anything that profound in all of this, but maybe it's not that typical to talk to kids like they're human beings, or treat them with respect, but I think it's pretty easy. I do it all the time, so I don't think it's all that magical, but apparently it's less common than it should be. For the record, I don't think most kids are any more mysterious than most adults, and certainly talking to them isn't any more difficult (at least not for me).