Is Baby Talk Good for Your Baby's Development?
Am I a joke to you?
It’s common knowledge by now that you’re supposed to speak to your baby using adult words and phrases.
“Let’s circle back on that,” you might say to a baby who is asking for milk.
“How can I help you achieve your personal goals?” you could ask a crying baby.
“Don’t piss in my face and tell me it’s raining,” you might say to a baby as they piss in your face.
Fun!
Listen, speaking to a baby as if they are an adult is silly, they can’t talk back to you, they drool, they have short attention spans. And it’s not like when you have a friend who’s no good at conversation, because a baby won’t even have the coordination necessary to back you up in a fight.
No, your baby isn’t much good at anything. YET! If you want your baby to learn how to speak, the only thing you can do is model it for them. Talk to your baby when you change their diaper. Talk to your baby when you feed them. Talk to your baby when you’re trying to shave, but the baby wants you to hold them so you only have one hand and you have to figure out how to spray shaving cream into your free hand using the hand that’s already holding the baby and then the baby eats a bunch of shaving cream and you just know they’re going to have a big white, wet poop that will be hard to explain to your wife. Talk to your baby!
Some people automatically fall into a pattern of using “baby talk.” This is where an adult uses a weird voice and says things that aren’t words to a baby until the baby, out of frustration presumably, learns to speak and yells “HEY! ENOUGH!”
Don’t baby talk. It makes no sense. How can you teach a child to speak English by speaking a nonsense dialect with all kinds of extra syllables? You cannot. Imagine your only English tutor was Jar Jar Binks. It’s a disaster.
Instead, just be your normal self to your baby. When you’re packing up to leave the house say things like “Let’s get all your stupid baby crap packed up for our trip to the store! The store! We need all this garbage for the store! And you love it! YOU LOVE ALL THIS STUPID GARBAGE WHY ARE WE TAKING IT WITH US IT MAKES NO SENSE!?!?” or “Off we go!”
I myself often say to my baby, “Hey. What are you doing? Stop doing that. You’re still going to do it? Why are you ignoring me? Hey!” Now consider all the baby has learned:
Hey is a sound you make to get someone to pay attention to you.
Interrogatories go up at the end.
Statements and directives do not.
Daddy would rather ask questions and shout things than get up and stop his baby from doing whatever she was doing.
She can get away with anything if she just does it before Daddy reaches his “OK fine, I’ll get up” phase.
Learning!
