Do You Want Your Child To Grow Up Smart? Talk To Him

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-07 22:18

In September last year, British teachers raised a fuss: more and more first-graders went to school unprepared for learning, because they lagged behind in speech development from the norm, natural for their age.

According to the observations of kindergarten teachers, an increasing number of children were unable to adequately interact with their peers and did not perceive the teacher's speech when he used everyday vocabulary: he talked about vegetables and fruits, garments, tried to interest children in songs.

Communication between children was also disrupted: the number of words perceived and used by them was significantly less than that used by their parents at the same age (hard to believe, but there are entire organizations that note such trends and add them to the statistical database!).

I am 27, and I dare to consider myself, if not the leading expert of the digital age, then at least knowledgeable enough to determine where the computer is on the monitor. I discovered the world of the Internet when I was a teenager, and since then my life without the World Wide Web is unthinkable. However, such discoveries cannot leave me indifferent, especially considering my interest in teaching the language to adults and children and part-time therapeutic practice.

When I was little, having a TV and radio in the family was not considered a luxury for many years. In the urban environment, the number of TV channels made it possible to feel the freedom of choice, although the parents were in no hurry to abuse the “teletime”. Therefore, when we visited my uncle or grandfather's family in Berdichev, the noisy radio and TV in the background knocked me out of my rut. I could not comprehend how the layering of other people's voices of reporters and film actors can be welcomed at the dinner table, when in the first place, it seemed to me, should have been a conversation about who ate what, to whom how much the salary was delayed and other topics worthy of discussion in the family …

Moreover, I drew attention to the fact that as soon as the relatives found themselves in a situation when the TV was turned off, no one could immediately concentrate on what he was eating, and a frightening silence reigned at the table.

Years later, research at the UK's leading institution in Yorkshire confirmed my fears: Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have found that background noise, consisting of rambling voices from the TV, causes the child to lose the ability to isolate information - and, as a result, control your attention. Dysfunction is gaining momentum, provided that the man is surrounded in the background by incoherent streams of speech.

If you haven't already drawn the parallel between the ever-playing TV and attention deficit disorder, let me remind you that most of the life functions that allow us to calmly do more important things are controlled by the subconscious. The subconscious is the very autopilot that commands the infrastructure of our body, is responsible for physiological functions and supplies our speech apparatus with words that surprise us, as soon as a colleague pours coffee on us.

The ability to concentrate on important things and, one level up, choose exactly which important things to concentrate on is a characteristic of a conscious person. A lot has been said about mindfulness today. And not in vain: a conscious person who makes a conscious choice is the next step in evolution, to which the modern way of life pushes us. Whether we like it or not, the inability to control our thoughts - and with it the inability to control attention - leads to stress, burnout, depression, apathy and, as a result, the notorious existential crisis that most earthlings of our time suffer from.

Why is the silence so scary? Because our mind cannot be inactive. We grow up in a culture where we are constantly busy with something. We live in a world where you NEED to be busy. We live in a world where inaction is equated with laziness, and laziness is equated with unproductiveness, and if you are unproductive, it means that you are useless, and if you are useless, then you are worthless in a world where everyone is in a hurry and developing, and you, like that drone, crawled out and you are sitting on the couch.

However, only in silence are we able to hear the voice of the heart. Self-observation, self-inquiry are wonderful techniques. They can work only on condition that they do not think about them, but actually do them!

If you feel that your head is too noisy, that concentration is difficult, and the number of thoughts swarming in your head is greater than the number of stars in all galaxies combined, let me assure you that you are not alone. Noise pollution outside, the result of which is a rumble of thoughts inside, is today no longer an ephemeral abstraction, but an actual physical causative agent of an internal crisis.

Try to include a few minutes of silence in your daily routine and watch what happens to you. See what thoughts and emotions come to you. Emotional discomfort is the perfect feedback mechanism. It shows us that we are moving in the wrong direction and that somewhere within us a child is crying, that something has been deeply disturbed, that suppression is present. That we cannot accept ourselves in our entirety.

Thoughts of judgment and comparison are a wonderful tool that points us with perfectly calibrated precision to those aspects of our personality that we project onto others without realizing that they are present in us. Those of us who gaze at celebrities in awe are often in denial of our positive strengths. The acceptance of these sides significantly contributes to the development of the individual.

The development of speech, the ability to use language taking into account linguistic and metalinguistic nuances is a necessary step in the development of a mentally healthy person.

So, if you are a parent who wishes to help a child realize his intellectual potential, what steps should be taken?

1. Talk to your child. What is the difference between a cartoon and a direct dialogue with a man, who, perhaps, is not even at that age yet to provide a full-fledged, grammatically coherent answer? During direct communication, the parent's attention is entirely directed to the child. Comprehension is formed through non-verbal signs, gestures, facial expressions, intonation, pauses, and pitch. And most importantly - the energetic message that the parent puts into speech (in other words, directed attention).
2. Let the child choose where his attention is directed and follow him. Comment on anything your baby is interested in. For example, if you notice that the child is carried away by the mechanism of the typewriter, shift your attention from any other toy to the typewriter, and, most importantly …
3. … React quickly. When commenting on objects around, remember that you have only 2 seconds to switch to the object that interested the baby and start talking about it. For example, if you notice that a child is looking at a bird, you can engage in a monologue of this kind: “Yes, what an unusual bird. I think it's a bullfinch, look at his red chest! The bullfinch is a winter bird. No wonder we saw him outside the window in January! Did you see how he deftly landed on a rowan branch?"
4. Don't be afraid to use “full-fledged” colloquial constructs when talking to your child. You've probably already heard that from early childhood you need to talk to a baby as you would with an adult. Don't neglect this advice! By observing children, scientists have found that the reproduction of the language heard by the child occurs with a delay of a period of one year. For example, a speech heard at the age of two, a person begins to reproduce at the age of three, and so on. Even if it seems to you that your child is not very talkative compared to other children, this is not a reason to stop communicating! On the contrary: imagine that the baby's mind is a sponge, which is saturated as it is saturated with free speech, and at one moment this sponge will undoubtedly “burst”!

With all my heart I want to please parents who feel financial insolvency and are afraid that social status can affect the development of the child's mind: in the course of observing children, it was determined that communication with parents affects the child's vocabulary, his intellect, building logical connections, comprehensiveness and consistency thinking, much more than the most expensive educational toys. And don't forget to turn off your TV!

Lilia Cardenas, integral psychotherapist, teacher, psycholinguist