Friday, January 13, 2012

Speak like a child

I've been looking after our youngest for a day a week for a few months now. He has turned 21 months and his language is really starting to develop.

There was a lovely moment today when he looked at me and said "Daddy kind."

It would have brought tears to my eyes if it wasn't for the fact that I was cleaning his bottom at the time. He'd just squeezed out the sort of mega poo, which is about as close as men get to giving birth, so I'm not surprised that he thought I was being kind.

What did surprise me was that he knew the word in the first place and had an idea of its context.

I had been at a stay and play earlier where one of the mums told me that a health visitor had told her that her 18 month old daughter should be able to say 50 words by now. That seemed a lot to me, and although it was only a few months ago for KidA, I'm not sure he would have made the target.

He's been a bit slower developing language than his big brother, or so it seems (memory plays tricks on you. I thought his brother was a walking, talking genius at roughly the same age until videos proved that he wasn't quite the prodigy I remembered.) One of the things about young 'un was that he had a highly developed sense of grunting which was quite expressive and got him a long way for a long time.

Recently I suppose he's discovered that grunting has its limits and is being more adventurous with his speech. It's quite a magical time and there's something new every day, some of it rather poignant.

From quite young he has referred to himself as 'you', which is understandable, as that's what everybody else calls him. But the other day he started using 'me'. It was a bittersweet moment - a little more clarity in communication, but a cute idiosyncrasy lost.

The whole language thing is fairly amazing when you think of it. Even children brought up in the most intellectually and emotionally deprived circumstances will develop speech beyond the abilities of any other animal. Kids just play with the building blocks of language until they find something that makes sense or amuses them.

At the moment KidA is starting to string together two and three words. It's still simple stuff, but it's the start of big changes.

2 comments:

Helen said...

That's lovely - heart-warming and yes a bit bittersweet when they move from babble into a more formal understanding of language structure. I hate the whole 50 words by such and such a time thing. I was told it was 50 words by two years for my eldest. I kept ridiculous lists and got myself into a right state before a health visitor told me that comprehension is as important as expression and as long as my child understood me and could be understood - it was all good. It was fine of course, we went from one off words to full sentences with not much in between.

Hackney_bloke said...

It is such an amazing time at the minute Helen. We've had the first time he's said his brother's name (amazingly resistant to that one) recently and he's just discovered the 'love' word, so he's loving everybody at the minute, which is wonderful.