Baby Talk: How to Speak to your Newborn
Parents of newborns often hear about the importance of speaking to our babies. It’s sound advice, as far as it goes: research shows that exposing very young children to language boosts their brainpower and prepares them for later academic success.
But the guidance feels incomplete. How, exactly, should we speak to our very small children? What should we say? Does cadence matter? Tone? Worse, for parents who want desperately to give their babies a leg up, obsessive focus on language can come at the expense of other important experiences, driving exhausting and unproductive parenting practices.
Fortunately, language development research adds texture to the standard advice with practical applications. The key, it seems, is to focus on the quality of our infant-directed speech, not just quantity. By providing lots of one-on-one conversation in high-pitched, animated voices–baby talk–we maximize the bang for our conversational buck. With any luck, we may even convince ourselves that it’s okay to shut up from time-to-time and just enjoy a moment of silent reflection.
Benefits of Language Exposure
The science makes clear that babies benefit from exposure to a rich language environment. Hearing words not only increases the child’s vocabulary, but it improves his or her ability to learn new words, setting them up for future academic success.
- In one study, researchers found that children who heard more words during their first three years had richer vocabularies at age 11 than peers with less language exposure. Word exposure was the single best predictor for the size of the children’s vocabularies in later childhood–better even than their parents’ IQ or the family’s socioeconomic status.
- In another study, researchers found that children who hear more words process language information faster than others. Their brains are quicker to make the connection between a word and its meaning, which gives them a head start in reading comprehension, memory, and other important skills.
Overdoing It: Parental Word Vomit
Although I hadn’t read these studies, I appreciated the benefits of infant-directed speech when we brought P.B. home from the hospital. I knew that his brain thirsted for language. And I was overawed by my responsibility to meet that need. I probably took it a bit too far.
P.B. was depending on me to wash his little mind with language, I thought. With the right words from Daddy, he could become smart, quick-thinking, loquacious. Without them, his mind might remain an unworked diamond, a dull mass concealing untapped potential. Every sentence I spoke felt incredibly meaningful; every moment of silence a betrayal.
So, like a filibustering Senator, I filled every moment with speech. Sometimes, I would narrate our activities: “Changing your diaper. Just a touch of ointment. No diaper rash here!” When that well ran dry, I would read aloud anything at hand: articles from The New York Times, marketing emails sitting in my inbox, passages of Aristotle’s Politics. Anything.
When that got dull, I tried singing. Lullabies were okay, but they got boring quickly. So I found myself singing more modern songs. American Pie by Don McClean and Simon & Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence were in heavy rotation. But my scramble for brain nourishment took me into virtually every genre. I can only imagine my neighbor’s reaction to hearing my toneless renditions of Old Town Road through our adjoining wall during 3 am bottle feedings.
The routine was exhausting. Every time I handed P.B. to Mommy, I nursed a sore throat and a vague sense that I’d let P.B. down by speaking too little or saying the wrong words.
Finding Balance: Quality over Quantity
Parenting shouldn’t be so extreme. While speech is important, so is balance. Without it, even the most well-meaning practice can become a chore. Worse, by fixating on a single aspect of a child’s development, as I did with my word vomit, we can forget their other needs. Bonding requires not mindless chatter but present parenting and loving, undivided attention.
Fortunately, science suggests a better approach. As I now know, a key finding from language development research is that while the quantity of words spoken matters, quality is key. What promotes language skills is not so much the number of words a child hears, but the style of speech and the context in which it occurs. The most beneficial interactions, it seems, are one-on-one conversations using an exaggerated, animated speaking style, baby talk.
One study examined thousands of recorded exchanges between parents and babies and tracked the babies’ development over time. Researchers found that the more parents spoke using high pitch and exaggerated vowel sounds, the more babies babbled at one year of age, a precursor to spoken words. When the babies turned two, those who heard more baby talk knew more words than their peers who were exposed primarily to adult conversation.
For me, these findings highlight the importance of being strategic with language exposure. Random sentences uttered without context do babies little good. When I marched through The Star Spangled banner for the third consecutive time with P.B., the double encore probably didn’t move the needle on his cognitive development. It just left me feeling grumpy and disconnected from the baby staring up blankly from my embrace.
Why waste our limited reserves of parental energy on such a futile exercise?
Better to spend that time thinking about meaningful ways to engage our babies with language. This means focusing on topics the baby can understand–basic activities and immediate surroundings. It means pairing our words with appropriate facial expressions. Most important, it means speaking in an animated, exaggerated tone. In sum, we should try to catch the baby’s attention, invite them into conversation, and encourage them to follow along. As one researcher put it: “It’s not just talk, talk, talk at the child. It’s more important to work toward interaction and engagement around language. You want to engage the infant and get the baby to babble back. The more you get that serve and volley going, the more language advances.”
Prioritizing high-quality baby talk has improved my conversations with one-month-old P.B. Somehow, chatting about all his bottles full of “boob juice” sparks a light in his eyes that I never saw when reading him news stories on COVID-19.
Focusing on good speech has also freed me to embrace the occasional silence. At peace with P.B.’s language nutrition, I no longer find myself desperate to fill every moment with words. Sometimes, after reading P.B. a book or making up a song about his most recent blowout, it’s okay to let him rest quietly on my chest, feeling the rise and fall of his breath.
Written by Trevor
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Why baby talk is good for your baby
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