We live in a noisy, intrusive world, but don't allow the television, theradio or the housework to distract you from spending time face to face withyour baby, writes Louise Holden
Early parenthood is life in a light opera; songs about climbing the stairs and changing your trousers get you from scene to scene without losing the audience. Until children learn their own script (miraculously quickly, in most cases) filling dead air becomes second nature.
It's just another of those basic parenting instincts which has been validated by scientific research. The more words a child hears in the first year of life, the better his chances of reaching developmental milestones on time or early. Getting a good linguistic start has implications for literacy, IQ and socialisation in adulthood. Most parents provide that good start without recourse to self-help books or consultancy - chatting and singing to babies and children teaches them all they need to know about adult communication.
There are, nevertheless, challenges to overcome and up to one in 10 Irish children will experience some delay in speech or language learning. Hard-to-avoid health problems like recurring middle-ear infections, unavoidable learning disabilities like autism and unforeseen emotional traumas in early childhood can all get in the way of normal speech development.
There are more common environmental contributors to delayed speech development, too. These are the obstacles that all parents can endeavour to remove from their children's learning experience.
According to Professor Anne Geraghty, chairwoman of the Irish Assocation of Speech and Language Therapists, one of the major factors hampering everyday language learning is age-inappropriate interaction between parents and children. It may seem obvious, but children need to be spoken to directly using slow and simple language. Every child can benefit greatly from daily, one-on-one interface with an adult who is not distracted by any outside agents.
Obviously, as parents we are in constant dialogue with our children, but how often do we spend more than a couple of minutes locked in uninterrupted exchange? Interruptions include background noise of any kind, from TVs to tumble driers, other adults distracting us or bottles and nappies absorbing our attention.
Speech and language therapist Dr Sally Ward, author of the bestselling parenting guide BabyTalk, advocates spending half an hour every day concentrating on a baby's linguistic and play development to the exclusion of everything else.
"We live in an increasingly noisy and stimulating society, and very many children literally never experience a situation in which they are only listening and attending to one source of sound at a time. These two foundation skills of listening and attending are vital to all later learning," says Ward.
That golden half-hour may not be a realistic proposition in homes where there are two working parents, other children, ringing phones, blaring TVs and a constant buzz of activity. But Geraghty says that even five minutes is highly beneficial - as long as it happens every day.
The intrusion of background noise is thought to complicate the process of language learning for most children. In researching this article I have started to assess the level of noise in my own home and to ask myself if every layer of sound is really necessary. Often the radio is babbling to nobody, or some talking head on the TV is addressing an empty couch. Even when playing with my son in a relatively quiet setting, I am carrying on conversations with other adults or simply thinking aloud in language that is too quick and complex for him to latch onto.
It's not necessary, says Geraghty, to take a pedagogic approach to play. There's no need for structured linguistic tuition. Don't try to force your child to copy sounds or pay attention to activities. Follow his lead, copy his sounds and be guided by what interests him.
Dr Sally Ward agrees. "In the early stages of attention development any attempt to keep the baby's attention on a particular focus, after they have shifted it spontaneously to another, only serves to fragment that attention by splitting it between the child's and the adult's focus."
Children normally say their first meaningful word somewhere between nine months and a year and a half. Prior to that, they are building up to the event and every sound heard adds to a child's understanding of communication. As adults, we experience the daily sensory overload of living in a technology-saturated world. Imagine how much more stressful it would be if in the midst of all those competing messages we were trying to grasp the fundamentals of sound and language! To clear a little space for quiet, simple communication in our every day lives may be as beneficial for our own mental health as it is for our children's development.
