#4 - Do you feed your children's brain with fast food or healthy food?

Dea parents, thx 4 da fenomenal +ve response 2 last week’s post. Hope u’ve managed 2 reduce da no.of misd cals. :) ;) 

No, no. Let me get out of my WhatsApp mode and try again!

Dear parents, thank you for the phenomenal positive response to last week’s post. I hope you have managed to reduce the number of missed calls!

Somewhere between the age of emails and social media, we seem to have developed a sense of urgency and laziness while communicating with each other. While it’s helped us at times to make messages brief and clear, it’s done so at the expense of quality communication. Poor grammar, abbreviations and acronyms (all leading to limited vocabulary) have become commonplace.

And this is what scares me

This is what research on language skills in early childhood suggests:

1. Conversations have the strongest positive effect on language development.

2. The more words the adults speak to the children, the larger the children’s vocabulary.  

3. But here is the deal breaker: Both the quantity and quality of words spoken to a child in the first 3 years of life predict a child’s language and emerging literacy skills.

Picture courtesy: Link

Has the “social media vocabulary” seeped into our day to day conversations? How can we keep this vocabulary (or rather tendency) away, when we are dealing with children? 

Just as a child requires an adequate amount of nutritious food for physical growth, so too does a child need language for his or her brain development. And that is why…

Language is the food for the brain

But what kind of food do we want to feed our children’s brain with? Should you be looking to feed their brains with fast food (“social media vocabulary” - which is tasty but unhealthy) or a wholesome nutritious meal (like how our parents and grandparents wrote snail mails, which is difficult but rewarding in the long run)?

Recently, I came across this term called “Language Nutrition” and found this excerpt from a research paper insightful:

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“Early exposure to language-rich interactions between adults and children forms the basis of Language Nutrition, a term created to describe the use of language sufficiently rich in engagement, quality, quantity, and context that it nourishes the child neurologically, socially, and linguistically.”

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Towards addressing the foundations of Language Nutrition:

1. Quantity of words: This requires you, the adult, to “get chatty” with your children. You can do this by:

   1. Describing the routines (“We are now washing our hands”)

   2. Responding to their non-verbal communication with words (“I can see that you are excited looking at that train”)

   3. Expanding on their comments (“I heard you say ‘eat’. Do you want to eat more food?”)

   4. Introducing new vocabulary during routines by using rare or uncommon words (e.g., “I have a big appetite. I am eating a lot of food today!”).

   5. Repeating unfamiliar words in different contexts and on different occasions.

   6. Offering children verbal explanations for unfamiliar words.

   7. Older children: Echoing their thoughts (“I agree that it is difficult”)

   8. Older children: Asking open ended questions using different vocabulary.

2. Make it a habit to use complete and grammatically correct sentences wherever possible. If you need a playground, practice on WhatsApp (“Amazemax” and “Awww” make you look cool on social media, but it may not be long before they seep into face-to-face conversations with your child. Also, I’m not advocating English proficiency here).

3. Serve & Return is a great way to build social interactions as well as to keep the conversation going, in the language your child is most comfotable with!

Do you have any other ideas to provide “Language Nutrition”? We would love to hear them!

References:

1. The Power of Language Nutrition for Children’s Brain Development, Health, and Future Academic Achievement

2. More than baby talk