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Talk to your children - Baby Talk
Look who's talking Never mind books, tapes, computer games and other education aids. The most important thing you can do for your children, it turns out, is simply to talk to them. And sing, and laugh, and interact. There's a growing body of research to show how fundamentally important early communication is for babies and young children - not to mention for older kids, too - and this week there's an official acknowledgement of that with the launch of a booklet by the government-funded Basic Skills Agency. The booklet urges parents to take as many opportunities as they can just to talk to their child. "All the studies show that babies and young children imitate and mirror their parents," says Alan Wells, director of the BSA. "And we know that talking to children early on in their lives improves skills such as reading, writing and numeracy later on. "Simply speaking to your child matters more than the parental level of achievement - it's not about your level of education, it's about how much you are interested and involved in your child's development that counts." And if it sounds self-evident, it's not yet a message that is getting through. A survey of headteachers in Wales found they believed as many as 50% of children were starting school lacking the communication skills necessary to learn effectively. "That's very important, because the danger is that children end up failing from very early on," says Wells. "If you fall behind in the early years in your school career, research shows you'll be behind when you leave." The answer, he says, is interaction. And you can't start too early: babies develop the ability to hear at 24 weeks' gestation, so talking and singing to them in the womb isn't barmy: there's even research to show your baby can tell from your voice whether you're happy or sad, stressed or relaxed. By birth it's all systems go and, says Lynne Murray - professor of developmental psychology at Reading University and co-author of The Social Baby: Understanding Babies' Communication from Birth - it is hard to overestimate the complex skills possessed by a newborn, which enable it to interact with other people. Babies, says Murray, come wired to talk, and the person they most want to communicate with is their mother whose voice, of course, is the one they know best. "We've done experiments using a dummy the baby can suck on to activate a voice recording, and we've been able to show that a baby prefers the sound of a human voice over a non-human sound, prefers the mother's voice over another person's voice and prefers the mother's voice talking 'baby talk' to talking in an adult way." ************************************************** **************************** In fact, says Murray, researchers have found that baby talk has a great deal in common the world over. "If you listen to the baby talk of a Mandarin Chinese mother and a British mother, you'll be astonished at the similarities," she says. "A lot of people are embarrassed by baby talk and think they won't use it, but we believe the pitch people instinctively use for babies is the sound they most like to hear and the sound they learn a lot from." Classic baby talk has a rhythm and intonation not unlike music, which underlines its importance, too, in helping babies and children communicate - the BSA's booklet advises parents to "sing in the car, in the rain, in the bath, even when you're tidying up". What music does, says Colwyn Trevarthen, emeritus professor of child psychology at Edinburgh University, is give babies and small children clues and insights and a sense of what's going on even when they don't understand the language. Not only that, but it's laying the language of grammatical construction, which ultimately has a rhythmic foundation. "Music carries a lot of information about the basics of human communication," Trevarthen says. "And we've found that babies as young as five months can vocalise and improvise just as well as clever musicians - they can understand and fit in and initiate sounds in a quite extraordinary way." ************************************************** **************** But it isn't just developing speech and literacy that talking and singing to babies gives, it is emotional stability too. What babies get from a "conversation" is the reassurance that they are cared for, that they can "ask" for something and have their needs understood and met. What researchers such as Murray and Trevarthen have found is that parents and other adults who might be sceptical to these claims are often astounded when they see video feedback on mother-and-child interaction: spelt out frame by frame, the complexities of even the smallest baby's ability to "listen" and "talk" are usually very clear. Babies turn their heads to their mother's voice, make hand gestures, use facial expressions to show how they're feeling, make eye contact and get all sorts of cues from the sound of the voices around them. So is conversation the Holy Grail of parenting? Certainly they think so in Stoke-on-Trent, where a pilot project called Stoke Speaks Out is underway, uniting specialists from midwives through speech therapists to teachers and psychologists in one simple aim: to get babies and children engaged earlier in the art of speaking and listening. "We're trying to encourage language at every stage of early life," says Janet Cooper, who runs the project. "We know it can make a huge difference. We don't want to blame anyone, but we want to put the importance of talking on everyone's list. We know family life is busy, and we don't want parents to feel guilty about TV and computers, but you can always make room to talk. It helps children with literacy, and it goes on helping them, too, with relationships and with their behaviour and with managing family life." Time spent talking is never time wasted, that's for sure. (The Guardian, 26.01.05) -- Dorothy There is no sound, no cry in all the world that can be heard unless someone listens .. The Outer Limits |
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