Oh, yes indeedy. The good thing about most of them is that you can only half listen, inserting a few, “Oh, really?” and "uh-huh"s in at random, and they’re happy as clams just to talktalktalktalk.
My former bosses’ daughter (who lived upstairs of the office, so was in my space a LOT) was one of these, and once I learned I could just keep on working and throw a syllable or two her way every minute or so, I grew to not mind her nonstop chatter so much. She was really sweet, she just LOVED to talk. She didn’t care so much about being listened to!
I was like this as a kid. As I got older, I realized that just saying whatever was on my mind could get annoying, and started paying more attention to other people. Eventually, I got to the point where, in most conversations, I was only encouraging other people to talk. I’ve only recently (past couple of years) started working on establishing an equilibrium between active listening and sharing my own ideas, as I realize the former gets boring after a while.
That’s hilarious, the first thing I thought when I read the title was “Do NON-obnoxiously talkative children exist”? But I see I was beaten to the punch a few times. So I’m not the only one with a kid who won’t shut up.
But seriously, she won’t. Ever. When she was around 3 and 4, and I mentioned her incessant talking, everyone was all “oh yeah, all kids are like that”. No, they are not! She talked much more than the children of parents who were presumably not quite as close to losing their minds. Now at age 10, she still talks and talks and talks. It was such a blessing to me when she started chatting with her friends on the phone, because with just the two of us living together, to have all the talking directed at me almost killed me.
Picture this scene - a mum and a four-year-old riding to preschool on their bikes. The following monologue is delivered to each new person walking in the opposite direction, and doesn’t let up until the person is well out of earshot behind the family - this of course means that the last bit of the monologue must be delivered with head slewed round behind, minimal attention to steering, and at TOP VOLUME in order to get it all out:
Wouldn’t it be safe to assume that obnoxiously talkative adults were like that as children? I mean, I could see obnoviously talkative kids learning how to shut up as they grew up, but I can’t imagine someone just waking up one day and having a broken faucet for a mouth.
The most talkative kids I’ve seen tend to have parents who talk back to them and indulge in their verbosity to a certain extent.
You clearly haven’t met my son. I love him dearly, but most car rides with him are a combination interrogation and endless commentary. He’ll ask me questions about something, then ask why. When I tell him why, he’ll ask why. Then why again. When I ask him what he thinks, he’ll say, “I don’t know, you tell me.” Then there’s the commentary on everything he sees. Which, of course, generates more questions.
I make a very strong effort to answer every single question, even the endless whys, but it’s not easy. When we visit my mom’s house, which is three hours away, he usually talks the whole way. It’s incredible.
Oh yes. Some kids just have to talk all the time. Some of them learn to tone it down after a while. Once upon a time, I would have to ask my kids for a few minutes of quiet so I wouldn’t start screaming–I would say that my ears were full.
It is my impression that, between adults, e.g. driving for an hour as driver and passenger, and not maintaining a conversation, seems to almost invariably regarded as utterly abnormal (some time ago I drove that way with my lady friend. Afterwards we discovered that, while she thought she was obviously giving me the silent treatment for something specific I did, I was oblivious of that because I had no expectation of talking all the time).
Driving with kids, they may talk (at length) when they feel like talking, but OTOH don’t consider it wrong not to talk absent a reason to talk.
So it may be that some people may in fact become more garrulous by adopting adult social rules - because they adopt a rule that a conversation must be maintained at any cost.
I’m not sure. Some people seem to become more talkative as they gain confidence and maturity. For a friend who has not seen them since college, it might appear that the faucet “turned on” at some point.
I have a faint recollection of a study non-talkers who became talkers after traumatic head injury, but my google-fu is failing to find it again.
My oldest is uncomfortable with silence. Lucky for him, he’s usually pretty entertaining. But I don’t answer the phone unless I plan on listening for at least an hour. He knows this about himself, so he’s not offended if I don’t pick up. And he’s working on listening, asking an occasional question, etc.
He was like that as a kid too. I think it’s one way he controls his environment.
My younger daughter was, and still is, an inveterate chatterbox. On a family vacation when she was maybe about 5 we made her a bet that she could not sit there in the back seat and be silent for 10 minutes. She lost.
My daughter had a friend over last weekend she met through a play she was in. We were told she had a diagnosis of ADD. I don’t know if that factored into it but you could get a whole evenings entertainment out of this girl just by asking a simple question.
Once she started talking she would respond to the original question and then just start free associating and never stop until interrupted.
Great kid but she could talk the hind leg off a donkey.
My daughter is talkative, but she’s not obnoxious and she’ll tone it down if you ask. But she has a little friend who I SWEAR realizes she’s making people uncomfortable and relishes the thought. She’s only seven but she’s very clever and it could be great fun having her around if she wasn’t so often deliberately rude. I blame her parents of course. They are exactly the same way.
Deborah Tannen (socio-linguist) wrote in one of her books about different styles of talking (women among women, men among men, people from different family and cultural backgrounds) that many women are culturally raised to consider silence uncomfortable - the “cold shoulder” treatment. In addition, talking for them is not simply (as many men believe) a way to exchange information, but to keep and nurture a friendly atmosphere and a good relationship.
One way this manifested in a particular women she described was that she would never stop talking, for fear of an uncomfortable silence ensuing, instead she would keep going over stuff that she’d already told, waiting for the other person to interrupt her. As often with different styles, no problem as long as the other speakers feel allowed and comfortable to interrupt and this leads to a lively, spritited talking.
But if the other speakers are men brought up to convey information and then stop, and to wait for other speakers to finish, this can end uncomfortably.
As for children who talk non-stop, I wonder how many do this precisly because the adults around them don’t listen fully to them, but continue doing their tasks? If adults, esp. the important adults like parents, don’t take children seriously with their fears and worries, children either clam up (and you pay a small fortune later to a therapist for the task of listening to your child, for what you could have done yourself), or they start talking about everything in the hope somebody will finally pay attention and ask about what’s really on their mind.
And if people only pay attention to every tenth word, then you need to repeat everything ten times to make sure something gets through to the other side, right?