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| Monday, 31 January 2005 |
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Parenting: importance of talk by Joanna Moorhead The most important thing you can do for your children is to talk to them, even when they are too young to answer back. 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 is 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 is an official acknowledgement of that with the launch of a booklet by the United Kingdom's Basic Skills Agency (BSA). 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." And if it sounds self-evident, it is not yet a message that is getting through. A survey of headteachers in Wales found they believed as many as 50 per cent 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 Mr. 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 cannot start too early: babies develop the ability to hear at 24 weeks' gestation, so talking and singing to them in the womb is not barmy: there is even research to show your baby can tell from your voice whether you are happy or sad, stressed or relaxed. By birth its all systems go and, says Lynne Murray, Professor of Developmental Psychology at Reading University in southern England 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 Ms. 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. In fact, says Ms. 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 is going on even when they do not understand the language. 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 Ms. Murray and Ms. 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 are 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 under way, 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. Time spent talking is never time wasted, that's for sure. (The Hindu) |
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