Baby talk ... and talk, and talk, and talk

Some kids love sharing what they think about. All the time. Whether you want to hear it or not.... — 123rf.com

Parents often look at their young children and wonder what they’re thinking.

My wife and I don’t. We know exactly what our two-year-old is thinking. Because he tells us. Every single thought that’s in his head.

Whether it’s eating a treat and looking up at me also eating and exclaiming “Dada eating the food”, or seeing a clown on the street and observing “Uncle (because every man he doesn’t know is "uncle") have a red nose”, our boy Will just speaks.

When he goes to bed, the routine used to be saying every word that he knew in a cycle until he was whisked off to dreamland, and I was able to combat crawl noiselessly out of his room to safety. Now his nightly routine is telling us one occurrence of the day over and over again until he sleeps. For instance, I heard the story of how he pooped at the park over and over for 40 minutes until Will drifted off to sleep, his pooping story just as good as counting sheep. At least our boy is sleeping.

The interesting thing is that Will speaks a lot and it’s not just English. My wife is Romanian and she’s made an effort to expose our son to Romanian consistently even though it’s difficult since at home it’s just English-speaking me.

We decided to try to get him to speak English and Romanian knowing that it might delay his speech. Sometimes, kids exposed to multiple languages take time to sort them out in their heads and their vocabulary might seem small. A child speaking one language might have a vocabulary of 20 words, while a bilingual child might have a vocab of 10 words in each language; functionally, though, it feels like half the word power even though the child does indeed know just as many words as the monolingual child.

But this slow down in speech didn’t happen with our boy.

Will was taught words for colours and shapes in Romanian but wasn’t really speaking in the language despite my wife speaking it to him constantly. Then one day, she asked him how to say some colours in Romanian. To our shock, he rattled them all off. We moved on to shapes. He did those too. Then we went to numbers and he counted to 10 in Romanian. It was surprising to say the least. It’s like he had been listening the whole time but hadn’t needed to speak Romanian until we asked him.

Now Will switches between English for me and Romanian for his mother. He’ll look up at the night sky and announce “moon” to me and “luna” to his mum.

But the result of all these linguistical gymnastics is that he never really stops talking. Whether it’s in English or Romanian, our boy is constantly observing something and just telling us. It might be a dump truck or double decker bus or it might be him walking in on me showering and announcing that he can see my genitals. Either way, Will says everything that is on his mind.

Now this is all fine right now. What he sees is cute and fun. But what happens when he starts having other thoughts about people, places or things, perhaps more judgemental thoughts. Is he going to just announce things to the world? It’s definitely a challenge my wife and I will have to deal with. It’s funny when your child is noticing innocuous things and announcing them, not so funny if he’s noticing things that might hurt people’s feelings.

In any case, Will doesn’t seem to be shy and gravitates towards sharing his thoughts verbally with whoever will pay attention to him. It makes me wonder how much of this is his actual personality or if this is just a phase he’s going through. I suppose time will tell.

Though I can see the merits of having a quiet child. Our friends’ daughter, Agnes, is a little older than Will and much more reserved. She still has fun but is more prone to looking and observing and processing events slowly. Then she seems to choose what she shares verbally very carefully.

Once, her father was looking at her and said, “Sometimes, I wonder what’s going on in her head”. And I nodded and looked at our son repeating that the cockroach was on the wall but gone now, and said, “It must be nice to wonder about that”. Because my wife and I always know what Will is thinking.

---

Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and check out his stuff at jasongodfrey.co. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.