Two decades ago, when my husband and I became parents for the first time, I knew we were embarking on a strange and wonderful journey. Four children and many years later, I have learned to appreciate the magnitude of the influence we have on our children as they grow, especially when it comes to spoken language. Whether we realize or not, we parents are language teachers. We’re the ones who teach toddling, thirty-pound citizens how to communicate verbally.
We think the job is easy, that it happens by itself, but it took me awhile to realize it’s not exactly that simple.
Some years ago, I brought a bag of groceries into the house and set it on the kitchen floor. My son Eric, who had just turned three, pulled out a bag of kiwi fruit and yelled, “Potatoes!”
My daughter Stephanie, who was ten then, giggled and gently corrected him.
“Those are kiwi, Eric,” she said.
“Potatoes,” he said softly but sternly.
My daughter wisely let the matter drop. There was no sense in getting into Word War I with a three-year-old.
Eric was also the child who called his Tommy Tippee cup his “ball” when he was a year old. At first, this threw us for a loop. He’d ask for his “ball” and then point to the yellow cup he drank milk from. We finally figured it out. The cup was a little yellow globe with handles. It resembled a ball.
We should have been consistent about correcting him since we were, after all, his language teachers. But we didn’t. We started calling it “ball,” too.
A few days after his third birthday we were seated in your garden variety Hamburger Land and I was opening four tiny milk cartons for four hungry kids. My husband Bob was on a mission to get ketchup when Eric took a tentative sip from the strange, little house-shaped carton and then announced, “Mmmm. That’s ball.”
Houston, we have a problem, I moaned inwardly.
Bob returned with six, tiny pleated cups of ketchup and I broke the news to him.
“Eric thinks the white stuff that comes from cows is called “ball.”
My husband just rolled his eyes and glanced over at our little tow-headed student happily sipping “ball” through a straw.
At the same season in my life, questions on higher vocabulary were being sprung on me by my older children. A few days later, I was explaining to Josh, then eight, that a triangle has three sides because “tri” means three, quadrangles have four sides because “quad” means four and octagons have eight sides because “oct” means eight.
“What has six sides?” he said.
I thought for a moment. A horrible feeling of ineptness crept over me. I drew a blank. I was in the middle of a severe brain warp.
Surely it can’t be a sexagon! I gasped to myself.
My son waited.
“Uh, I can’t remember. I’ll have to get back to you on that one, Josh.”
Hours later in the grocery store the black hole that had swallowed my brain retreated and my random access memory was restored. I suddenly remembered.
“A HEXAGON!” I shouted to the cereal boxes.
I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my son so I wouldn’t lose my tenure.
I felt much better after I told him. Unfortunately, like many triumphs in parenting, the euphoria was temporary. Minutes later I realized my son probably had deduced that women who give birth to six babies at once are said to have had hextuplets.
Seriously though, all of us teach by what we say, and not just during those years when we are parenting little ones. Our role as “language teachers” is especially heightened when our children are young, but our influence as communicators doesn’t stop when our kids have mastered the vocabulary. As our children grow, they learn less from what we say and more from
