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| How should you talk to your baby? | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Baby talk, it’s generally agreed, is silly and self-indulgent and does nothing for the baby, an approach as faulty in its logic as that of the English person speaking louder that the non-English person might better understand him. I don’t do baby talk to my babies. I do, however, do something that, I realised recently, is almost as bad – an over-correction every bit as mannered as pulling faces or piping up in shrill tones – and that is talking to them as if they are 40. | Baby talk, it’s generally agreed, is silly and self-indulgent and does nothing for the baby, an approach as faulty in its logic as that of the English person speaking louder that the non-English person might better understand him. I don’t do baby talk to my babies. I do, however, do something that, I realised recently, is almost as bad – an over-correction every bit as mannered as pulling faces or piping up in shrill tones – and that is talking to them as if they are 40. |
| There is a rationale for this: it aids language development, increases vocab and doesn’t condescend to the baby. But I suspect that’s not why I or anyone else does it. The real reason, I think, is that it is a discreet form of status signalling, an effort to distinguish oneself from all those pandering helicopter parents and to assert, if only to oneself, that in spite of spending a large part of each day changing nappies or talking about Elmo, one can still formulate a sentence with subclauses. | There is a rationale for this: it aids language development, increases vocab and doesn’t condescend to the baby. But I suspect that’s not why I or anyone else does it. The real reason, I think, is that it is a discreet form of status signalling, an effort to distinguish oneself from all those pandering helicopter parents and to assert, if only to oneself, that in spite of spending a large part of each day changing nappies or talking about Elmo, one can still formulate a sentence with subclauses. |
| I noticed it at the park at the weekend. A man was pushing his toddler in the swing next to ours, and the child, who wanted to get down because he preferred another swing, was revving up for a tantrum. “What you’re doing is absurd,” said his father in measured tones. “You have free will, of course. But you are proposing to stop doing something you’re enjoying because you can’t do something you think you’d enjoy more but that isn’t available at this time, and that is simply an absurd position to hold.” | I noticed it at the park at the weekend. A man was pushing his toddler in the swing next to ours, and the child, who wanted to get down because he preferred another swing, was revving up for a tantrum. “What you’re doing is absurd,” said his father in measured tones. “You have free will, of course. But you are proposing to stop doing something you’re enjoying because you can’t do something you think you’d enjoy more but that isn’t available at this time, and that is simply an absurd position to hold.” |
| This was, on one level, funny – just as I find it funny, if my children grab Madame Bovary from the shelf, to give them a detailed plot summary, or to point to the Play-Doh snakes they’re making and start talking about genetic variants. But it was also a performance and, as such, was less for the benefit of the child than for the other parents within earshot – and this struck me as creepy, or at any rate sufficiently detached from the kid’s interests to undo the advertised benefits. I resolved to stop doing it myself. | This was, on one level, funny – just as I find it funny, if my children grab Madame Bovary from the shelf, to give them a detailed plot summary, or to point to the Play-Doh snakes they’re making and start talking about genetic variants. But it was also a performance and, as such, was less for the benefit of the child than for the other parents within earshot – and this struck me as creepy, or at any rate sufficiently detached from the kid’s interests to undo the advertised benefits. I resolved to stop doing it myself. |
| Then, on Sunday, I overheard a conversation on a subway platform and decided there was a middle way. A woman stood with her young daughter, looking at the printed-out changes to the schedule, which, she said, were a vast improvement on subway statements of yore, which used to be in a tiny font and didn’t accord with any recognisable reality. There was no archness in her tone – it was quiet and conversational and completely in earnest – and the child, who was about four and can’t have understood the half of it, nodded gravely and looked up at her mother, rapt by the assumption she was taking it in. | Then, on Sunday, I overheard a conversation on a subway platform and decided there was a middle way. A woman stood with her young daughter, looking at the printed-out changes to the schedule, which, she said, were a vast improvement on subway statements of yore, which used to be in a tiny font and didn’t accord with any recognisable reality. There was no archness in her tone – it was quiet and conversational and completely in earnest – and the child, who was about four and can’t have understood the half of it, nodded gravely and looked up at her mother, rapt by the assumption she was taking it in. |
| Try it? You won’t like it | Try it? You won’t like it |
| Sometimes old formulations surface unbidden, bypassing my conscious responses. One night this week we had spinach pie for dinner, or rather I did, since I couldn’t get anyone under the age of two to eat a bite. “Don’t like it,” came the response from the first, then the second child, to which I replied with the swiftness of reflex, yanking me back 35 years to a different table, a different time. “How do you know if you haven’t tried it?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were futile. For whatever reason, all the food items my mother subjected to this pat rationalisation are the things I continue to hate. | Sometimes old formulations surface unbidden, bypassing my conscious responses. One night this week we had spinach pie for dinner, or rather I did, since I couldn’t get anyone under the age of two to eat a bite. “Don’t like it,” came the response from the first, then the second child, to which I replied with the swiftness of reflex, yanking me back 35 years to a different table, a different time. “How do you know if you haven’t tried it?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were futile. For whatever reason, all the food items my mother subjected to this pat rationalisation are the things I continue to hate. |
| Back to the bad old days | Back to the bad old days |
| I went to a screening of Hidden Figures this week, a forthcoming movie about African-American women doing groundbreaking work at Nasa in the 1960s. It was a good film; but what struck me is that, with Trump as president-elect, something has happened to the feelgood factor of considering how far we’ve come from the bad old days. | I went to a screening of Hidden Figures this week, a forthcoming movie about African-American women doing groundbreaking work at Nasa in the 1960s. It was a good film; but what struck me is that, with Trump as president-elect, something has happened to the feelgood factor of considering how far we’ve come from the bad old days. |
| This movie, which focuses on a little-known corner of academic segregation, ends with a character meeting Barack Obama, the implication being that history is an ultimately progressive force. This was probably never true; but for the first time, that fallacy feels starkly apparent. | This movie, which focuses on a little-known corner of academic segregation, ends with a character meeting Barack Obama, the implication being that history is an ultimately progressive force. This was probably never true; but for the first time, that fallacy feels starkly apparent. |