A so-called “new” study into talking to babies? !

Don’t let rational thought get in the way of all the slagging off of the young mums here. The ‘Children Are to Be Seen and Not Heard’ generation were perfect parents who know better than every modern parent, clinician, and baby device maker. Apparently, restricting a child’s view of the world around them and starting blindly at them in a pram would have stemmed the technology addiction that even the elderly generation suffer from .

I agree fully that no matter how much it appears to be common sense, all the recent neurological findings regarding myelin production are worth reading about. It’s good to know the ‘why’. Not sure why all the perfect mums on here are being so smug. Maybe Gransnet has an abundance of neuroscientists and I was just unaware.

So if even a very small proportion of these women start talking to their weans because they have read this article, I shall be happy and refrain from making snide comments

I wondered if there was a thread about it on Mumsnet?

Maybe Gransnet has an abundance of neuroscientists and I was just unaware

Maybe.

Typically developing babies have brains that are wired to react to speech sounds and recognise patterns within it, from birth if not before.
They also recognise high contrast visual patterns from birth, especially ones that resemble eyes and a mouth, but they don’t recognise colour at first, just high contrast black and white, then red - but that takes a few months. The lovely pastels we surround babies with are only perceived as the same pale blur as are the pretty pictures we surround them with. Photographs are coloured paper not images for quite a few months too.
But they can usually understand simple words and sentences by 7 months, which is much earlier than they can “talk”. (All due to myalinisation - the insulation of their neurons )

It goes without saying, there are mothers who shouldn’t be mothers, just like some dog owners shouldn’t have dogs.

I see too many mothers ignoring their children, not dressing them properly, mothers who overfeed their children with inappropriate snack foods, don’t care about reading to them, use them as pawns in divorce cases thereby making the other parent the enemy. Other injustices…

No emotional connection, poor development during those informative years. No wonder we have mental health issues in our country.

You reap what you sow. Yet you will try to blame others for your dereliction of motherhood.
😢
USA Gundy

My DD is almost 50 now but I used to talk to her constantly about anything and everything. By 2 and a half she could speak fluently in quite long sentences. On the other hand DS1 was born 16 months later and he was late speaking. My theory for this was he was lazy . He didn’t need to talk as big sister would speak for him , he would bring me a cup if he was thirsty or a plate if hungry 😋. He’s 48 now and talks a lot in his job so he did catch up !

Gundy

It goes without saying, there are mothers who shouldn’t be mothers, just like some dog owners shouldn’t have dogs.

I see too many mothers ignoring their children, not dressing them properly, mothers who overfeed their children with inappropriate snack foods, don’t care about reading to them, use them as pawns in divorce cases thereby making the other parent the enemy. Other injustices…

No emotional connection, poor development during those informative years. No wonder we have mental health issues in our country.

You reap what you sow. Yet you will try to blame others for your dereliction of motherhood.
😢
USA Gundy

Presumably these horrible mothers didn’t conceive immaculately, right? These women ruining society got pregnant by someone with a Y chromosome, correct?

Where do the obviously absent fathers fit into your ridiculously sexist, outdated meathead rant?

How about this, focus your attention on the deadbeats dads who neglect these children, USA Gundy. Your precious USA suffers mass shootings on a weekly basis, mostly due to angry, maladjusted males with weak male role models. Your male politicians are beholden to the male-driven gun lobby that promotes the violence and toxic masculinity that fuels the violent murder of young children by murderous males.

You reap what you sow. Yet you will try to blame mothers for your dereliction of fatherhood and common sense.

I talked all the time to my DDs and GDs. When they were in forward facing push chairs our walks were stop/start because I kept stopping so we could talk to each other! So often parents are on mobile phones and even very small children are watching a screen so no communication and no noticing what is going on around. One small child I knew always seemed to be wearing headphones on car journeys so not much communication about the journey, things to look out for etc

Do you know what’s really striking here, how all the blame is placed on the mother. Post after post of ‘mums these days’, yet no mention of fathers? When most families these days have two working parents, often for children as young as 6 months, and therefore two parents who share childcare responsibilities. Perhaps internalised misogyny should be the researchers next topic.

Yes we all know phones are bad, but I don’t think phones are solely to blame. Or rather, parents on phones are solely to blame. As others have pointed out, phones have largely taken the place of the labour intensive housework required in past generations, or attitudes of children being seen and not heard, or watching tv. The real issue is young children being given phones, rather than letting them play. Tv isn’t quite so bad as they can still run around and play or chat whilst it’s on, but with a phone or tablet they don’t as they have to sit and it’s more solitary than watching tv. For a short time per day it isn’t going to do harm, but some children are left like that for hours, which is far more harmful than not having an adult interact with them as they aren’t interacting with the world around them.

As for more children going to school with poorer language skills, not toilet trained and poorer social skills these days, I think an area that’s often overlooked here is that these children are, for the most part, attending nursery full time from very very young ages. Now on the surface that seems like it would help development but it’s clearly not (at least on a population level). Nursery ratios are several children to one member of staff, they aren’t getting enough solo attention whereas in previous generations most children had a parent at home during the early years, and not all nurseries will be proving good quality care. Plus, research shows that it’s best in the early years for children to have one main carer for attachment, lots of children will have many carers from a young age. Not that I’m advocating women not working, but I do think that because both parents are working they don’t have the time to give as much 1-2-1 attention to the child, particularly if they’re in daycare 8-6 every week day, there’s just no time, so things like toilet training get left to nurseries who also don’t have the time or staff to accommodate it. I don’t really know what the answer here is, better funded nursery care with more qualified staff? Better parental leave packages? And then it becomes an issue of governement funding but it’s costing more further down the line with more children needing specialist input whilst at school. Investment in the early years pays off later.

I think it’s a more complicated issue than just parents on phones, and more of an issue in that childhood experience has shifted from being a lot of free play time to watching phones/tablets, playing games on them etc. Im not saying those things are awful, my older two certainly do them but it needs to be balanced with time just being kids as well.

As for forward facing pushchairs, most are reversible. My first two DC parent faced until nearly 1 when we changed to a stroller but DC3 hated being in the pushchair from about 5 months old, until I tried forward facing him and then he sat quite happily, preferring to see where he’s going. I suspect he will be a terrible back seat driver in the future.

NotSpaghetti

Families I supported years ago did not all know this.
One mum of a toddler specifically told me she didn't talk to her as you "can't have a conversation" and it was "boring".

Maybe more evidence will encourage Labour to re-launch SureStart which was having an impact on these underprivileged children.

This is what I was going to post NotSpaghetti. I was encouraging a young mum to make eye contact, sing and talk to her baby. What for, she saud - she’s too young to understand me.
Sometimes being able to quote the obvious research helps. It definitely helps to be able to say this approach was central to the support the family were guven

Here we all are glued to our phones and tablets
Complaining that others are too.
A most unscientific study by me of my 7 DGC;
The most articulate one so far is an only child who didn't have a pushchair at all. They live up a steep hill and carried him in a backpack until he could walk. He didn't have a screen either and even now aged 11 has restricted screen time.

My youngest DS was a late talker and I also wonder if he didn't need to bother but he is, and always has been, an excellent listener and now works in HR.

Here we all are glued to our phones and tablets
Complaining that others are too.

That always amuses me about threads like this.

I think that people always feel the need to justify the way they brought up their own children, and many like to do that by attacking those who do (or did) things differently. It's not just a 'grans' complaining about young mums thing - it works the other way. too. I often find the intergenerational conflict on here dispiriting. Times change, and nobody is good or bad for doing what others around them are doing, or adopting the fashions of the time they happen to live in.

The only “person” I am neglecting while on my iPad is Rosie the hound and she is sound asleep

Perhaps the study might have been useful if the overuse of mobile phones while caring for babies and young children was compared with the non use. Like said before I shake my head when I see the non communication between mother and child as a result of constant phone use. Also see children collected from school get onto buses while the adult stays glued to a phone, get off later still attached. In each case both adult and child lose out. I expect they get indoors and the tv goes on. Nothing wrong with that if there has been conversation before and after. It’s not just about talk it is the attention that a child needs to feel valued and a subject of interest.

Here we all are glued to our phones and tablets
Complaining that others are too

I did think that Grammaretto 😁

No, I am not. I have a computer on a desk, which I sit at several times a day to access GN, essentially the only social media I access.

I do not have a tablet and often have no idea where my smartphone is and even sometimes forget to take it with me when I leave the house. I am not a technological dinosaur, but I have better use for both my hands and my mind than to constantly looking that those irritatingly small screens with barely 6 words on them.

What is more, despite having 2 generations below me, none of our family clutch their phones constantly or bring them to the table with them. yes, their phones are much more necessary for their work and school work than my phone is to my life.

What is more, very few of my friends families are phone freaks. As you walk through any town your will see the phone fanatics clutching their phones while walking along, pushing prams and even driving, but you will also see many other, possibly the majority of people of all ages who aren't.

I hate these global sweeping staements that are so evidentially wrong.

I think that it should be remembered that people who judge someone on her phone pushing a pram, have no idea if she is making a doctor's appointment, taking a work call, arranging a funeral, sorting out a 'playdate' for her child or what she's doing. Context is very important to these things.

Diplomat

As a retired teacher I hope they now publish a study on the importance of singing nursery rhymes to young children for early reading skills, rhyme, rythmn and memory. My 2 1/2 year old granddaughter can recite several. We practise in the car, great fun!

You’ll be pleased to know this has been done! Research showed that children who could recite 8 nursery rhymes from memory by age 4 had better literacy skills at age 8. Nursery rhymes are really important for early language skills!

Doodledog, I actually thought that earlier today after seeing this post. I dropped DC1 to school and her teacher mentioned some things that may help with her handwriting, so on my way to taking DC2&3 to playgroup I went onto Amazon and ordered them before I forgot. I did laugh thinking I wonder if someone’s judging me right now.

Research showed that children who could recite 8 nursery rhymes from memory by age 4 had better literacy skills at age 8. Nursery rhymes are really important for early language skills!

It is not the nursery rhymes that have this effect, it is that children who know nursery rhymes are more likely to come from highly literate households, where children are talked to a lot, read to a lot, own books and where lots of memorising and learning games are played and the parents also own books and are seen reading them.

Grammaretto made a joke, M0nica.
It was irony too.

No matter what device you were on, you were reading and contributing to the thread! 😀

I couldn't use a phone to work on either, too small. However, a tablet or iPad is more user-friendly, particularly if using YouTube to follow a difficult piece of craft etc.

Foxygloves Talk about Department of the Bleedin’ Obvious!

All people know to read and talk to babies.

Article: 'academic' blib blab. A need to pontificate wildly.

But ALL people don’t know to read and talk to babies as we have discussed. Plus scientific explanation of how the brain works and develops has lots of uses. It’s not “bleeding obvious “.

M0nica

^Research showed that children who could recite 8 nursery rhymes from memory by age 4 had better literacy skills at age 8. Nursery rhymes are really important for early language skills!^

It is not the nursery rhymes that have this effect, it is that children who know nursery rhymes are more likely to come from highly literate households, where children are talked to a lot, read to a lot, own books and where lots of memorising and learning games are played and the parents also own books and are seen reading them.

Whilst those things do also play a role, nursery rhymes themselves have been shown to have this effect. They teach pitch, voice inflection, rhythm and the repetition means children learn to copy them earlier (think of how many toddlers learn to say ‘row row’ quite early). They learn new vocabulary and because people tend to sing them quite clearly and loudly they learn to enunciate. Plus they learn that it follows a structure with sequencing, like a story does, with a beginning, middle and end. There’s lots of literature on it, nursery rhymes themselves have a positive affect on a child’s literacy skills in childhood.

My DMiL was a reception class teacher in a school in an area, that over, her 30 year teaching career, she saw go down hill until it became an area where the Council parked problem families.

She would talk of children coming to school, who had been talked at, over and through, but never talked to. They had severely limited vocabularies, couldn't recognise different shapes or colours and had never held a pencil, done any drawing or seen a book. Children like that have little chance of making up the backlog of knowledge they have not got before school and achieve the literacy and numeracy levels of children from culturally richer homes.

Well yes, but that’s an obvious and widely known fact. Children’s educational attainment is positively correlated with social economic status, that’s widely accepted (although mothers education level has the strongest influence). However, there have been studies that have shown that knowledge of nursery rhymes is strongly linked to reading skills even when parent iq and social background is controlled for.

Nursery rhymes really can make a difference. Along with encouraging people to talk to their babies, the importance of singing nursery rhymes, and getting them to act them out, needs to be emphasised as well. There’s literature on this for the last 20 years showing a strong relationship and yet over the last 8 years since I’ve had my 3 DC not one health visitor or any of the many leaflets I was given pointed it out.

Of course, if a parent neglects a child to those levels then they’re going to be at a massive disadvantage, I’ve worked in education myself for over 10 years so I’ve seen this myself. But I’ve also seen many children thrive when given the right support at school and finally given the attention and opportunity. And in most cases, the most socially and economically deprived children now get free nursery hours from age 2, which the parents who put in little effort with their DC are often very keen to take, which gives them some preschool education.