The Choice of Joy: Day 36, Getting Something Right

I just watched:

http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-02-16&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

The video is about how infants learn language. 

After watching this video, as I often do, my mind races to possibilities and new suppositions, frequently extending the information far beyond the truth of the research. 

With the above disclaimer, I thought back to becoming a mother.  I remember deciding not to talk “baby talk” to my firstborn.  I would use the best of my vocabulary instead. 

I did the same with my second child.  At puberty, my oldest had an IQ of 165 and my second child’s IQ was not far behind.  Both have always ranked in at least the 95^th percentile in verbal skills on tests. 

Back to the video:

The speaker mentions the openness of an infant’s brain to learning.  The infant brain does not differentiate what to take in and what not to, but as we mature, depending on environment, parts of our brain fall into disuse while other portions further develop.  New tech devices have the possibility of developing further research on the way individual brains evolve, learning techniques and even keeping the mature brain open to new knowledge.

I look forward to further news about our brains and what science can do to increase human potential.

But even more, I look back and think that maybe as a young mother that I did something right.  For many parents, we are often reminded of all the mistakes we made as nurturers by our adult children.  And thus conditioned, every time a new study comes out on child psychological development, I check the history of my nurturing against the study, usually coming out with a failing grade.  So between my children’s interpretations of my failings and my own assessment based on new research, the list of my transgressions is rather long.   

Yet here is finally some research that makes me look pretty good.  Of course, I am making some pretty broad leaps in logic.  Providing sounds to infants to help them develop language is not necessarily pertinent to using those sounds in multi-syllable words.  I get that.  All right, it’s a stretch.

But my “I did it wrong” list is so long, that anything I can put on the “I did it right” list should be allowed.  Besides, those multi-syllable words I spoke just might have helped my infants get the concept of putting those syllables together and juxtapose them in certain ways.

I’ll take what I can get in the “I did it right” list.  Joy!