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."

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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."

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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 ..

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