- A guide for parents that would appear in a mother and baby magazine.
Now at this stage you probably have your child making you
sing nursery rhymes such as ‘Humpty Dumpty’ over and over again until you are
bored of it, and telling stories until you know them off by heart. As much as you are tired of them, your child
is hearing words and starting to pick them up, which makes it all worth it even
if you find yourself singing random simple songs in the kitchen.
When that all glorious first word
comes, that has you jumping for joy, you know it’s the start of their language
journey. Starting with one word, then building up to longer phrases you know
that your work, repeating words until you are sick of them, has paid off. But
while this is happening remember this quote said by the language expert Andrew
Wilkinson ‘language is acquired by imitation, but not only imitation’. At first
it doesn’t make sense, I know. But when you think back to when you have heard
children speak. Did it make sense? Was the grammar correct? If it wasn’t then
this is normal. To hear a child say something like ‘it flied’, you know you
wouldn’t have said that but know what they meant. If anything we can find it
cute. But if you think about it, they didn’t copy it from you; they are
starting to use words they think would be right based on what they know. It
would make language a lot easier if everything had the same rule, for children
and adults alike. This has been mentioned in poem such as Ogden Nash’s poem ‘It
must be the milk’ he says ‘their grammar is flawful’. Even if this does sound a
bit harsh, it shows that this is done by almost all children. If anything take
it as a compliment. It means your child is thinking by themselves.
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