Wondertime: Dad on a Lark, Stay-at-Home Dad, Blog: 4.16.2008 - and More Joys of Parenting Young Children

Dad on a Lark

A blog by Rand Richards Cooper, on parenting baby Larkin

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April 16, 2008

Nurturing and Measuring

more in dad on a lark:

4.2.08 : Unearthing

3.19.08 : The Failure

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First, thanks to those who posted after my blog on failure. It's nice to know that so many other parents of toddlers live half-buried amid mountains of stuff they're forever shoveling into the "guest" room. And laughing ruefully at the occasional reminder of life without little kids. Last week I saw a lifestyle article in the New York Times, titled "A Weekend Affair With Plants." The writer discussed how " the challenges of nurturing flower beds and vegetable plots and controlling nature are magnified for people who garden at their second homes," adding that "during the height of the season, a missed visit can spell catastrophe."

An undernurtured flower bed — at your second home! I sat there and shook with laughter — and envy — at such a friendly definition of catastrophe.

On the topic of nurturing, meanwhile...I've written before about language, and how fascinating it is to watch (to listen, really) as it develops in your child – bringing the person, and her personality, along with it. First, your toddler experiments with individual words. Soon nouns and verbs come together. As syntax gets more complex, so does the your child. She is really thinking now. Volition. Deliberation. Calculation. Narration. Complete sentences make the complete person.

Sunday mornings I take Larkin to the gym, where she hangs out in the kiddie room while I play basketball. On the way in we always stop by the big windows above the swimming pool. Last Sunday we stood for a while next to a mom and her placid two-year-old boy. Larkin loves watching the swimmers. She pointed and her eyes went wide. "Look, they're diving, Dada! They go under the water and come up again, and all the water is splashing!"

"She's only two?" the mom asked. "I'm impressed. She's so verbal."

"Yeah," I said, and rolled my eyes, "sometimes too verbal."

The complaint was partly to hide my satisfaction at hearing Larkin praised. She's verbal! Precocious! Ahead of her age! I think of this satisfaction as typically American. What's more American than wanting to get ahead in life? Our awareness of competition influences our view of child development and education — and especially these days. Used to be, if you thought your child was bright, you had her skip a grade. Nowadays parents are doing the opposite, holding their children back. I'm convinced it's because they want to give them a leg up. Keep her back a grade, and she'll be a little bit smarter, a little bit bigger, a little bit more assertive...a little bit ahead. Life is a contest, and we want our kids to win.

Molly and I always used to laugh about an acquaintance who, when you asked how his little boy was doing, would report that little Einstein was reading one, two, three grade levels above his own age. We used to joke that by the time the kid graduated from college, he'd be so far ahead, he'd have to retire. And yet doesn't that little glow of satisfaction I felt about Larkin show that I'm complicit in the attitude myself?

Recently I read an article about a company, Infoture, that sells a $400 device known as LENA, which stands for "language environment analysis." The LENA system attaches a voice recorder to your child's clothes and records all the sounds around your child during the course of a day. Software then analyzes what was said to your child and what your child said. The result is a percentile ranking for language, like the ones for height, weight, and head circumference that your pediatrician keeps.

So now if you're concerned about your toddler's language growth, you can give a number to the question, How does she measure up? And how do you measure up? Studies have shown, not surprisingly, that kids' language development depends on how often — and how variably — they are spoken to. "Parents," LENA's makers say, "can use the feedback to intervene and enrich their kids' verbal environment as needed."

OK, I'm down with that. Jettison the "little Pookie" endearments! Bring out lengthy sentences! Or risk impoverishing Larkin's verbal environment.

Seriously, I do have qualms about LENA. Critics worry such devices will create normative standards biased against quieter kids. Even more than that, I wonder about all this testing, testing, testing. Teachers in our schools already have to gear everything to the test. Do we want parents doing that, too? I'd hate to turn Larkin's experience of talking and reading into a road race. I wouldn't want to be the language equivalent of, say, Tiger Woods' taskmaster dad. And yet...the temptation is there. What if Larkin could become the Tiger Woods of American writing? And by the way, is it really true, as the Your Baby Can Read! language development system claims, that some two-year-olds are already reading? Oh no, Larkin's actually behind!

It can get pretty poisonous, this American fixation on life as a race. I think the antidote lies in just taking pleasure in your child's development for its own sake. Language acquisition is fascinating, with all its borrowing and mimicking and rapid adapting. Where did that come from? How is she suddenly conjugating verbs correctly? And how about the first time your child tells a story, with a before and an after? Or when she starts putting things together deductively and forming her own conclusions? The other day Larkin and I were in the car, and I took out a piece of candy. I tried to do it surreptitiously, but she saw.

"What are you putting in your mouth, Dada?" she asked.

"It's medicine," I said. "It's medicine for dad."

She went silent. In the rearview mirror I could see her looking at me and thinking. "Dada," she said, "Why are you chewing it?"

Oops! When did Larkin become someone who knew the difference between swallowing medicine and chewing candy, and who could ferret out my little deception?

In the end, LENA may be able to reduce your child's language growth to a measurement. But what can't be measured are those utterances, sometimes grammatically simple, that articulate a tender and surprising feeling. Last week Lark and I were walking back from the park and passed a neighbor's yard. "Look at that tree, Dada," she said. "That little tree is sad."

I looked. Our neighbors had planted three saplings. One was a willow, its shoulders slumped, its branches drooping down. It did look sad.

"Why is it sad?" I asked.

I waited while she thought about it — this person, stopping to figure out what she wanted to say. "It wants to go inside the house," she said. "It wants to go inside, and it's sad. Poor little tree."

And we walked around the corner and went home.

Editor's Note:
You can also read Rand's blog on Family.com, a sister site to Wondertime.com where you can post comments and connect with other Rand fans, and Rand will be able to be part of the conversation as well.

Rand Richards Cooper is the travel correspondent for Bon Appétit, and is author of a novel, The Last to Go, and a collection of stories, Big as Life.