Baby Babble

I was in a shop the other day, dithering and trying desperately not to look like a shoplifter. (I sometimes get eyeballed by security staff and snooty shop assistants, who glare at me as if I am just about to palm a pair of sheepskin gloves). A woman came into the shop with a pram and proceeded to have a full-on, question and answer, adult ‘conversation’ with her baby.

“There’s no point buying a passport holder for Grandma, is there? She never goes anywhere.”

She said.

There was a constant stream of this one-way conversation and I glanced at the baby to see if it was actually awake.

The infant in question was about three months old and dressed all in white, with a white woolly hat and had a slightly perplexed look in its huge, round eyes. It was as if it were thinking; ‘You’re presenting me with a complex range of questions here, Mama.’   But the woman ‘chatted’ away with her baby, as if she were talking to another adult.

It reminded me of being advised to talk to your baby as much as possible (when my children were babies) to help bond with them and to advance their speech and development.

This was something that I struggled with, in the beginning. I’ve never been very good at small talk and I felt a little awkward and self-conscious talking to my baby, especially in front of other people. The chatty woman in the shop obviously had no such reservations and her child will probably grow up to be Prime Minister or a top human rights lawyer or something. (I found her a bit boring and kind of wished she’d shut up - but then, one way conversations can often be somewhat tedious to overhear)].

The way that I approached the issue, initially, was by reading to the children, as much as possible. (We are told that even tiny babies enjoy being read to - the soothing rhythm of the words, the fact that you are focusing on them, etc)

Reading felt far more natural to me than discussing the weather or talking about what we were having for dinner, a far better fit for me. I put a lot of effort into the reading; like my mother did when I was a child, I adopted different voices for the different characters in the stories. I sang the songs, making up tunes for unfamiliar songs, when all I had to go with was the words. The children loved it. I remember my older child’s response when I first read to her, when she was a baby. Her little face was so expressive and went through various stages of delight (it’s much harder to capture her attention these days!). She still enjoys being read to and it’s brilliant to see her learning to read, and reading to her younger sister.

I also sang to them - another thing reported to help the development of speech, and took them to baby music classes and rhyme-times at the library. The younger child begged me to stop singing once, ‘Stop, sto-op! She cried in a plaintive voice, so, tough crowd and all that (but she did learn to speak very early, the ungrateful little squirt!)

I should also mention that, after reading a childcare book that I found very helpful:

Secrets Of The Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect and Communicate with your Baby – 2001, Melinda Blau and Tracy Hogg.

I kept up a light stream of ‘conversation’ where I detailed what I was doing - ‘Now I’m going to change your nappy’ etc. This was after the book had warned - ‘How would you like it if you were lying there and somebody just yanked your legs into the air, without warning?’ (Which is what you do with babies, when you change their nappy) So, after reading that, I used to say to the baby - Now I’m going to lift your legs, now I’m going to wipe you…’ A friend of my mum’s thought it was hilarious (and I dare say, ridiculous) but I still persisted. So, we learned together; me to communicate with my baby, my baby to form their own words. A bystander might have found my own monologues tedious to listen to but it was all to the good.

So, woman in shop, you keep asking your baby what s/he thinks of your Christmas present purchases, this time next year s/he will actually be able to answer you!