How do you talk to kids? I remember as a child that some few…very few…adults could talk to me in a way that treated me as a regular person; interesting and insightful with important thoughts to share. Others just asked “How is school?”
I now I’m an adult, with 2 kids of my own, I know fall into the latter category. I’d like to actually talk to kids though. Anyone here have that ability to really connect with kids? How do you do it?
Inspired by this thread.
Long before I had children myself, I was lucky enough to be having dinner alone in a casual restaurant. There was another woman, but not quite alone. In a highchair at the end of her table sat a child around a year old. She was carrying on a very one-sided conversation with this baby as if he were a friend. Just telling him all about her day and what she was eating, just chit-chatting away.
I was so impressed. Not a word of baby-talk and that child was riveted to her every word. From that day to this, I speak to children like I’d speak to anyone. I address them directly. I compliment their clothing choices. I don’t mention school right away. I listen to what they have to say when they can speak and compliment them extravegantly if they can’t yet. They seem to enjoy it.
No, I have no particular aptitude with children. I say this as a father of two - my daughter and son are now aged 10 and 8 respectively.
Still, I seem to manage. It has something to do with not being patronising. Kids will generally interact with you, and even if they don’t fully understand, they usually understand a lot more than we think they do. I tend to talk about sport and movies, if the kid seems interested. For others, just asking “What’re you into?” will start a decent conversation.
Never ask them about school. 
My choice of topics with my own children are, of course, heavily biased towards treating them like children. It is hard to talk about toilet training otherwise.
That said, I never babytalk to them. Always full words, always full emotion.
With other kids, I talk to them as if they were adults (again, with some consideration towards choice of topics). I hated hated hated people who told me how much I had grown as a kid. Ditto for people who asked about school.
Being knowledgeable of videogames and having had a youth of wanton recklessness does help a bit in trying to find topics of common interest. The fact that most kids who know me know that I won’t repeat our conversations to their parents also helps a lot.
I do a bit of both, depending on the age of the child. With babies, with that whole “Squee!” factor, I sometimes indulge my urge to say, “Oh, what a cutie pie, look at this chubby little leg!” pinch pinch
But then sometimes I narrate my actions, or just talk about anything. This is for babies who can’t talk back, so they’re a captive audience.
Older kids I usually talk to like they’re adults. I do ask about school or stuff like that, just to get the conversation going, but usually it’s like having a conversation with a very small adult with a totally warped world view. And I don’t censor myself at all (I mean, I don’t swear at them- I use the same big words that I’d use with a normal person). I make wry asides that only I laugh at, because the humor and vocabulary is totally lost on them.
This is an interesting topic, though. I read somewhere about a study of language skills among different socio-economic classes. They measured how many words parents spoke to their children per day, and compared results based on the parents’ income levels. The higher the income of the parent, the more they spoke to their children. And then in kindergarten, the higher the children scored on the language portion of standardized tests.
I’d bet that toddler in that restaurant will grow up to have pretty good language skills.
A buddy of mine has a kid and he just adores me. I talk to him all the time, and about everything. I showed him pictures that the Hubble telescope was taking online and all sorts of things. I’d very much like for him to come up with a big interest pretty soon (like dinosaurs or something) so I can start focusing some of these things.
There is no way on earth I can baby talk to anyone. I feel like a total douche. I can’t even baby talk to my cat.
If I talk to a kid, the conversation is going to be on my level even if the topic is not. If they start talking about a foreign subject, like power rangers (is that still around?), I inquire like I would if an adult started talking about nanotechnology.
Kids. Are. People!
I’m rather good at it, and my “secret” is your thread title. Kids are used to being “talked down to” but they don’t like this a whole lot better than do most adults. If someone shows genuine interest, they nearly always respond well.
Some other points are worth noting: To small children, adults are intimidating - big, loud, powerful, and with a dangerous amount of influence over children’s fate. Because of this, you need to proceed gently with children - to earn their trust. (The flip side is, of course, that a big, powerful, trustworthy friend is a great thing.)
Kids are often easy to fool in the short term, but not long-term. They know honesty from dishonestly at a very early age.
Kids often understand a lot more than adults imagine. Comprehension develops well ahead of the ability to talk. When speaking, adults are used to receiving subtle feedback; kids haven’t learned how to give this, so it seems as if they don’t understand - but this impression is often wrong. I have told reasonably complicated stories to fractious 11-month-old kids (who couldn’t say 2 words) and had them listen with rapt attention for several minutes.
An interesting game with a kid under a year old is to carry them around the house asking “Where’s the clock? Where’s the door?” If in the right mood, they will point. And you may be surprised at the comprehension vocabulary of a 10-month-old: “Where’s the mirror?” “Where’s the laundry” “Where’s the microwave?” - they often get these sorts of things right.
I hate when people babytalk to a child. We had a receptionist who did that to everyone’s child no matter how old it was and one of the engineers nicely asked her not to. She ignored him and holy crap did he blow up at her. I don’t do it. IMO, it’s demeaning.
When I talk to my baby sister (3) I speak to her as if I were talking to an adult, though I do keep my tone a bit lighter and “friendlier” as it were.
She’s a smart little cookie, and my dad and his wife don’t speak to her in “baby talk” so I’m not going to either.
Hmmmmmmm. I don’t know how to give a simple answer to the OP.
Given the vast majority of my contact with children is in school, it’s hard to avoid the topic! No family myself, although I’m now at the age where friends are starting to have babies, so I’ll no longer be able to say the previous sentence forever…
However, it’s not generally a typical teacher-pupil relationship. Most of my time is spent in one-to-one or small group situations. (For those that don’t know, I teach the violin.) This means I can always talk to them as individuals, which is actually what a lot of the question strikes me as actually being about, i.e. not talking to them as a generic ‘child’ for which there’s a single approach.
I also have a huge advantage in that we’re automatically involved with a topic in which the child has a specific interest (at least most of the time!), and so I can draw on the enthusiasm for a topic in the way Least Original User Name Ever is anticipating. This also means that I get to deal with the distinction between, on the one hand, the development of and interaction with them as a person, and on the other, the development of their intellectual and artistic capabilities. There reaches a stage where for some, then much, and then all of the time I can treat them as the young adults they are becoming, or have become, while the mutual and unspoken respect for a greater experience and knowledge remains. And whether or not they continue to study music, they are acquiring a vital skill, being able to acknowledge another person’s abilities without feeling intimidated by the actual person. And without the other person making unnecessary gestures to amplify the differences, which I believe brings me around full circle to the OP’s question.
Paradoxically, there are points at which a certain something clicks into place, when while they might still be in many ways a child in need of reassurance and guidance, and despite all the continuing differences described above, we are for the first time able to play a Beethoven sonata as equals. These really are truly wonderful moments.
I find it very odd how adults tend to think of children as separate and different to anything that they can understand - despite the fact that they used to be children themselves, and for some it was not that long ago. Kids are, of course, young adults.
Treating them as young adults and not as a separate species is easy - talk to them as people.
I talk to kids as students, even when they aren’t my students. It’s a different dynamic from anything else, as Gorilla Man has already pointed out–when done properly (and I do try to do it properly), it’s respectful toward and interested in the student, and there is certainly a lot of humor, but there is also an “When all’s said and done, I am the boss here” thread woven in there. You have to have that in the classroom, and I don’t really know how to turn it off for children that I am not actually the teacher of. My questions to children tend to be mostly about school, but since I teach they aren’t generic and work as ways to find common ground for real conversations.
So is Soylent Green.
When my son was a baby, I always talked to him in an adult manner. I’d narrate about whatever was happening (“OK, we’re going to drive straight for a little bit and then take a left.”) and, when he was old enough to talk, I would answer his questions so I wasn’t talking down to him. His vocabulary grew tremendously and he became a voracious reader.
My favorite memory was when he was about a year old I was taking an anatomy and physiology course. To help with my memorization of the bones when I gave him a bath I’d tell him what we were washing. “First were going to wash your Parietal, then the frontal, then your temporal…” He loved when we played, “This little phalanges went to market, this little phalanges stayed home…”
I made sure that I did the same thing when my daughter came along.
I’ve always talked to kids as if they were people. Meh. To me, they are people. When my kids ask a question, I try to answer it as I would an adult – “why is Sprite called ‘Sprite’ instead of something else?” gets an answer along the lines of “well, we could look up the origin of the name online if you want, but I would imagine it was a marketing decision – the manufacturers wanted a name that sounded both exciting and mysterious while being bland and inoffensive. A sprite is a mysterious little fairy creature, but also pretty benign.”
My kids and I talk like friends – always have. I mean, obviously, when they only spoke baby-talk, I didn’t use words like lugubrious or supercillious, but as they got older and could ask “what does that word mean” I stopped lowering my vocabulary for them. I figure when a person is old enough to ask for clarification, they are old enough to be treated as an equal.
I guess I’m going to be the voice of dissent, or at least clarification.
Babies *need *“babytalk”. That is, they respond more alertly and for a longer period of time to a high pitched tone with elongated vowels. The vowels are where it’s at for a baby; they’re what they learn to vocalize first. Most of us either sense this instinctively or are quickly conditioned by the baby’s actions into providing the kind of soothing, high-pitched coo they best hear and respond to. This doesn’t mean you’re limited to “Gooooo! Whoo’s a goooood babeeeee?”, but it does mean, as Sierra Indigo says, a lighter and friendlier *tone *than you’d use for your boss. I regularly narrate everything I’m doing or thinking or seeing to infants, but it’s definitely in a light and bubbly tone that I wouldn’t use with adults or older kids.
Toddlers are learning pronouns and possessives in particular, and the rules of conversation and polite phrasing as well. They need a lot of modeling for these. “I” and “you” are baffling (when you think about it, it’s really weird - if I say “here’s your towel,”, then you change that in your head to “here’s my towel,”, but if we’re talking about “his towel”, it doesn’t matter who says it. ) IME, they do best with a repetitive kind of talk so they can start to internalize the rules of grammar: “Oh, you found a hairbrush! Sally’s hairbrush! Your hairbrush! Let’s brush Sally’s hair. Let’s brush your hair…Now you brush my hair - brush Mama’s hair. Thank you! You’re Welcome!”
Preschoolers (and toddlers) need gentle correction, but not criticism. When they’re talking, the respond well to a lot of repeating what they say, ironing out any grammar errors without making a big deal about it. “Grandma gone to the stored!” “Oh, Grandma went to the store? What did she buy at the store?”
Once they’re around 4 or 5, then you’re into the territory Manda JO is speaking of. There’s always an element of “I’m in charge here, just in case the building starts burning down or something.” So while we can have conversations, they are never exactly the conversations of equals, in a power and responsibility sense. So just as I adopt a certain tone (of respect and deference) when speaking to my husband’s grandmother, I expect a certain tone (of “respect” - or at least lack of vulgarities and sass) from children. My tone to them is one of respect with a reserved right to correction or discipline.
Children are people. But they are not adults, neurologically, educationally or socially, and I don’t expect them to talk to me or me to talk to them the same way I talk to people who are my neurological, educational and social peers.
I’ll second this. I don’t talk to my almost-two-year-old as if he was an adult, because, well, he, isn’t one yet. I try to build on the words he knows to have an actual conversation with him - not simply talk to him all the time, but to interact with him, and to encourage him to name things and talk about them, too.
This is exactly how I treat the littl’ins. As it should be in my opinion. In Psychological terms, famed psychologist Piaget called is humanistic child rearing, treat children as little adults, meaning talk to them as a person not like this: Is Daddy waddy home from worky jerky…
Here is a link on this interesting topic:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/c/r/crm195/
There appears to be some evidence that “baby talk”, “motherese” or “infant-directed speech” actually helps babies with language learning, contrary to the consensus position here.