... if she understood English, that is. Maybe she’s starting to. That’s what I’m counting on.
My morning routine for years included catching up on the news first thing: national & international news, industry-specific news, and interesting articles that my friends share on social media. It’s a nice way to leisurely start the day.
Having a baby has made my mornings a bit more hectic and interrupted, but even in the hospital immediately post-birth, my routine remained the same. I’m a news geek. I love knowing what’s going on in the world and learning new things.
I’ve read so many baby experts proclaiming the importance of speaking to the baby and reading aloud for language development. Babies learn their mother’s vocal patterns in the womb and are comforted by her voice. Over time, the baby picks up on spoken sounds and begins to mimic them, learning the language(s) she is surrounded by.
In this household, we’re typical Americans who only speak English. But we have many different types of conversations. My husband and I can speak about our days, whine, flirt, and debate politics. My phone calls to customer service representatives take on a different tone than phone calls with my parents. We talk to our pets, constantly, words they may or may not recognize (and often choose to ignore).
And we talk to our baby, all the time, even words we hope she doesn’t quite understand like, “Go the … to sleep.” A baby book advised, “Narrate everything you do for your baby.” Without knowing if this does any good, I do narrate my entire day, every day as I hold my baby. I speak to my baby in normal English, baby-speak, and occasionally in sing-song just because. I don’t care how silly I sound to other people.
Who says babies can only be read baby books? My baby gets read a large amount of information related to my technical industry, a fair amount of national and international current events, and an occasional article about every day living. I also read aloud my own writing a lot of the time, not only to catch errors, but also to read to her. If I’m reading it anyway, I may as well read it aloud. It only takes a little longer.
She may not understand what I’m saying now, but someday she will. I would be proud if she grew up knowing her A, B, Cs and the names of newsworthy countries across the world. I would think it was neat if I could tell her about a work project I’m working on and have her actually almost understand it because she’s familiar with the vocabulary. If she can learn that Spot is the name of a dog who runs, maybe she can learn that Obama (or whoever is next) is the name of a president who runs our country.
I don’t know if it’ll turn out this way. Her young mind barely knows there’s a world around her, so comprehension of what she hears is undoubtedly low. I’ll keep reading to her regardless, whatever is in front of me. Maybe I’ll renew my lapsed newspaper subscription and let her tackle that along with Green Eggs and Ham. And it wouldn’t matter if she destroys and tries to eat the newspaper, which is also part of the learning experience.
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