Scientist Records First 5 Years of His Son's Life, Analyzes Language Development 160
jamie tips a story about MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy, who started a project five years ago, upon bringing his newborn son home from the hospital, to record his family's movement and speech inside their house. Since then, Roy has used various techniques to analyze and distill the 200 terabytes of raw data into useful and interesting visualizations.
"For example, Roy was able to track the length of every sentence spoken to the child in which a particular word — like 'water' — was included. Right around the time the child started to say the word, what Roy calls the 'word birth,' something remarkable happened. 'Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.' In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn."
Roy also compiled videos showing each time his son used certain words over a period of many months, clearly illustrating how those parts of the child's linguistic capabilities evolved over time.
"Unconsciously stress?" (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences.
As a father of three I can tell you that this behavior isn't "unconscious.". When your kids start to say words you will spend hours and then days saying them back to your children, to confirm what they said, to model better enunciation and to just to keep them engaged in a conversation with you. The words "by itself" bit is obvious - "affel" means either "I see an apple" or "I want a piece of your apple"; coaxing more out of your child at first would be torture and lead to frustration. "In short sentences" is also obvious - you wouldn't start your 18-month-year-old with long sentences.
Is there a story here or is this just a way for a guy to spend five fun years with his kid while drawing a paycheck?
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But my baby can read, because I bought the DVDs!
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/As+Seen+On+TV+-+Your+Baby+Can+Read!+Learn+to+Read+System/9924297.p?id=1218196479432&skuId=9924297&cmp=RMX&ref=06&loc=01&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=9924297 [bestbuy.com]
But seriously, most children of any culture throughout history develop language and behavior at roughly the same intervals. Early Childhood Development is easily understood, observed and recorded. It's frankly the reason most schools are broken down by similar g
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And because the british, french, and prussians education systems all interacted with each other. And if you didn't base your system on one of theirs, they had a few 'suggestions' backed by very big guns.
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You do realise that "across the globe" counts a whole lot more then these three?
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But my baby can read
Forget learning to read. My son was signing at 6 months old. Not real well--but he could communicate what he wanted well enough.
Kids are able to pick up on sign language and communicate before they are able to properly form vocal sounds.
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Of course it's true. Unless you have an MAEd., I'll just go with my qualifications for now.
Children everywhere on the planet have similar cognitive development rates, that are measurable and predictable, and have been labeled by cognitivists like Piaget. These same developmental milestones are what are used to form educational systems across the globe. It isn't by chance or by religion that schools are grouped by "elementary, middle, and secondary" (with variations, depending on country). It's because of
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Not to mention that US education is not that old. As recently as the 1940s the graduation rate was under 50%. Before 1880, most kids didn't go to school except the most privileged, urban families. We Amuricans don't got no long history of edumication as one would like to think.
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Human rights exist regardless of the religious frameworks you are trying to associate with human rights.
Just like morality exists without religion, even though religious people can't understand that.
I've lived 41 years with a concerted effort to avoid religion, yet I have a pretty good framework for knowing what is right and wrong...all your talk about your religions and cultures be damned.
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No, they can't. And babies can't read either. My point was sarcastic, but evidently nobody got it ;-)
There's also the "which glass has more water in it" scenario. (I don't remember the exact age or level of development, but) children of two different developmental stages (say 2 and 7 years old) where shown two glasses of water. One glass was tall and skinny, the other short and fat. The short glass had twice as much water in it, but the 2 year olds always pick the taller glass, because the water goes up
Re:"Unconsciously stress?" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure he meant 'instinctive' rather than 'unconscious.' Famously, your baby did NOT come with a manual that told you when to simplify your sentences to help him learn. I'm not sure where the line between 'common sense' and 'instincts' is, or whether we're just doing what we've seen other people do (i.e. learned, but not necessarily taught.)
Whatever you call it, however, 'unconscious' is definitely the wrong word.
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You didn't get the Manual? Heck, you can download it on PDF now!
I'm not going to spoonfeed those instructions to my baby. Let the little critter download it himself.
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Note: Most of those tutorials are for custom models with aftermarket parts. Factory models usually provide a lot fewer options. And even then, the order of operations may not be productive.
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Giggity.
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How about this? [haynes.co.uk].
A bit tongue in cheek, but still useful.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
There's also an "X For Dummies" book too : http://www.amazon.com/Your-Babys-First-Year-Dummies/dp/0764584200 [amazon.com]
Instinctively? (Score:2)
Maybe instinctively was a better choice, but then there's this:
Really, researcher, the infant is in charge of the situation?
I have the same problem with saying that guinea worm shapes sufferer's behavior. It might be convenient to get the host into the water, but this is more an evolutionary jackpot than any sort of control. It burns, people jump in the water, that works out for the parasite.
Humans tend to mimic other peoples' speech
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It didn't come with a manual, but for the obsessive parent, luckily there are hundreds of aftermarket guides, beginning with the ubiquitous Dr. Spock' Guide.
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I'm also a father and can say that this is one of the things I was most curious about. How kids learn to start talking. There really is a lot of trial and error at first and it takes a while before kids say anything intelligible. Parents of course become good at decoding what kids want.
Re:"Unconsciously stress?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Your post is an anecdote. He collected data. This is a story, and there an important difference.
As for not being obvious about the short sentences... with my youngest son (4th child, now 20 months old), I made the conscious decision not only "no baby talk", but talk in full sentences just like I do to adults.
I may say things 3 different ways, as well as point, draw and demonstrate but I still talk in normal adult-level conversation. You know, one step above PC tech support. :-)
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Why do you only talk like an adult? As far as I know, there's no (or mixed) support for talking like an adult versus "motherese." What is known is that children prefer "motherese."
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Because normal speech is what the child hears when anyone else converses. If I or my wife are speaking to each other, or to the other kids, or on the phone, etc. it is all "normal" speech. I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that "baby talk" would add an element of confusion for the child as it isn't reinforced by what they are immersed in.
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There is a difference between a case study and an anecdote. And, when dealing with humans, everything is an anecdote - because cultural, historical, generational and linguistic factors are not reproducible. Just being different people than our parents will make our children's experiences, skill acquisition, cognitive development, etc., different. The presence of different types of media technologies (and adults habituated to them) and so forth compounds that effect.
So, even if I had an amazing diverse data
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Most kids are not raised in double blind batches of 50.
There are some experiments that are impractical.
Some because of their scope.
Some because you are potentially fucking up the lives of real human beings.
Re:"Unconsciously stress?" (Score:5, Interesting)
As for not being obvious about the short sentences... with my youngest son (4th child, now 20 months old), I made the conscious decision not only "no baby talk", but talk in full sentences just like I do to adults.
We basically did the same thing with my daughter, now almost 6 years old. We never used baby talk [no 'baba' or 'wawa', always 'bottle' and 'water]. From day one we would talk to her constantly. We would explain every detail of everything we did in full sentences. Sure, we'd often use the high-pitched baby-talk cadence and tone [kids do respond to that and learn better from it], but always in full sentences .
The end result? Well, she didn't start talking particularly early, but she did move into complex sentences and ideas well before her peers. By the *beginning* of Kindergarten she was reading at a 2nd grade level with full comprehension, and able to get gist of most 3rd grade level stuff and higher. She has an amazing grasp of language. As an example, in the first month of her Kindergarten class, her teacher was walking them through the hallways. The teacher was asking the students not to look into the open doors of other classrooms. The teacher struggled to find the right word when she told them that the other classes might find it 'disturbing'. My daughter immediately pipes up and corrects her, saying, "Actually, I think you mean 'distracting'."
I'm no child development expert by any stretch of the imagination, but that strikes me as an amazing grasp of a very subtle difference in wording for a 5 year old to not only recognize, but immediately come up with the better word.
We still use complex sentences when we speak with her, and make a point to pull out all the stops with the vocabulary we will use with her. She's very good about stopping us and asking us what a word means if there's one she doesn't understand.
The downside to all of this is that she thinks most of her classmates are idiots, but frankly, she needs to learn to interact with people of differing abilities so she'll have to get over it. ;)
Now we just need to work on her math skills...
Re:"Unconsciously stress?" (Score:5, Interesting)
Now we just need to work on her math skills...
You may have jinxed yourself a bit. Cultivating precocity in one dimension seems to delay and sometimes restrict development in others. Especially during the most plastic periods of brain development, when there is almost a "neural arms races" to recruit "real estate" for different fluencies, abilities etc. The best advice, if you want a well-rounded child, is simply to allow the process to go on naturally, prodding for extra effort to get over occasional hurdles. Having educated "cognitively engineered super-babies, I think one does a child few favors by pushing for precocity. In fact, there are signs that it can be counter-productive, when the natural momentum of the early start is exhausted and they have to start "working" at it again.
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Are you and your wife physically active? Do you like going for bike rides, going to the park, swimming, etc (on a regular basis)? Kids learn most of their behaviors through modeling.
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Your wife interested in photographs, eh? Know what I mean? Photographs, 'he asked him knowingly'. Nudge nudge. Snap snap. Grin grin, wink wink, say no more?
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Give it up. Just buy bigger pants.
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I am a big fan of the power of mindless pap as a pedagogical resource! Or, at least as a short-term baby-sitting tactic.
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I think the only way I've failed her thus far is her physical fitness
You don't need to. I'm gonna anger a lot of people by saying this, but physical fitness is not really important. In a world where one can buy a $600 dollar part that can convert bioenergy into mechanical power at a 10X the power to weight ratio of a human being, it's not really all that important.
Oh, and mindless junk is important. Video games are the reason my first job was coding, not washing dishes. I was allowed unlimited game time assuming I finished all my school work. Guess what? I got bored of
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I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss what you call baby-bonics. Words are made up of simple sounds and this is what babies are trying to do. We encourage them by making those sounds back. From mastering those little things, they move on to bigger and better things.
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Maybe if we didn't teach kids to be retarded, they wouldn't be so shitty. I fucking hate children, but I find small asian kids unbelievably disturbing. Every child I meet is a retarded asshole... but the little chinese/japanese kids are like 3 years old, they're quiet, polite, they watch what they do, they get the fuck out of your way, and they don't touch your shit because it's there and they wanna get their grabby hands on it. WTF? It's unbelievably creepy. These are not the kids I'm used to.
We're d
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. Sure, the whole positive reinforcement vs. negative reinforcement idea sounds good in theory, but children really need to have active repercussions for talking back or screaming when they don't get what they want.
Oh fuck you, i can stand in the corner longer than you can stay mad bitch.
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Good on her, for the word correction, but I think that she chose the wrong word. Looking into a class shouldn't distract. It's the walking past that would do it. "Disturb" might be better, in that it might make students inside the class wonder why they are being looked at. Before they even notice that they are being looked at, they are being distracted.
I think that they both chose the words that reflected what they are trying to communicate, but the fact is that looking doesn't distract.
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The teacher struggled to find the right word when she told them that the other classes might find it 'disturbing'. My daughter immediately pipes up and corrects her, saying, "Actually, I think you mean 'distracting'."
It is very interesting that she did that, but not exactly justifiable. In a lot of cases, like this one, those words are pretty much interchangeable (a class - especially in kindergarten - requires attention to proceed smoothly, therefore distraction is disturbance). I find it curious that she phrased it as a correction instead of a question, like "do you mean 'distracting'?". I hope it's not the case, but I've seen my share of obnoxious kids with a certain excess of self-confidence and such behaviour is qu
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Arguably, self-confidence -- however extreme, so long as it's commensurate with ability -- is not bad per se. Contempt for others less able is the real problem.
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As for not being obvious about the short sentences... with my youngest son (4th child, now 20 months old), I made the conscious decision not only "no baby talk", but talk in full sentences just like I do to adults.
I think that most of the short sentences that GP is talking about are responses. Once a child starts saying "apple", a parent will more frequently say "you want some apple?" in response. As a result the average sentence length will go down. It has nothing to do with baby talk or even with conversation initiated by the parent.
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Because the data is recorded on non-subjective media.
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And because he can measure things like average sentence length and so on. I'd LOVE to have this kind of data...though I'd hate to sift through it all.
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Please explain.
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The raw videos are data. The subjective recollections on the events that were recorded are anectdotes. One depicts real events, the other does not.
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I'd say that's cultural. I don't think the Japanese have such a thing, but I'm not sure their language allows that level of corruption. I mean there's stuff like anata becoming anta, etc, but that's used between close friends and is a standard language feature rather than an improper corruption. It's informal. From a young age, children learn to speak up to those unfamiliar or in a higher class (elders, teachers, employers) with deference, and to those unfamiliar (peers) with ... less deference, yet sti
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I don't think evolution has anything to do with babytalk at all. And as far as everyone else's natural instincts -- after seeing what can pass for "common sense" in the world, then "yes", I think I do know better.
My logic was that the child hears "normal" adult speech everywhere else to the point of being immersed in it. Conversations between my wife, myself, my kids, and anyone else are all "normal" speech. Baby talk isn't reinforced at all, whereas "normal" speech is.
We also started teaching the little
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I find this to be interesting. I have noted that this same scientist is promoting some related software -- not something I am interested in. But the patterns of adults relating to children and the development of speech is of great interest to me.
My third son is growing up "bi-lingual." His mother is Japanese and I am a native English speaker. It is typical for adults to speak more slowly to a child to ensure that they are getting the information being transmitted to them.... at least it is normal here i
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I've been learning Japanese lately but my Hiragana is undeveloped. Been lazy with it though, I've had the language course for like a year now and I've gone through about 30 hours of study, with only 14 lessons so far... on average, I've done each twice. I need to pick up the pace; I have no real exposure.
I have found that the only way to make progress in learning Japanese (and probably other languages) is to do a structured course where you are forced to continue at a regular pace once you start. Otherwise you just keep learning a bit, then leave it a while, then forget and re-learn. I have heaps of learning software but I never use it, so don't progress.
In the first Japanese course I did, the first lesson or 2 were in roman characters to cover the basic structure, then we covered hiragana in one lesson and
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then forget and re-learn.
I never forget. In fact, I haven't studied Hiragana since 2 years ago, but every time I see Hiragana on food products at the store I recognize more somehow; but that is odd. I never forget spoken language though; when I was doing german, I would do a lesson once, stop for 3 months, then do the NEXT lesson starting cold.
Learning to read and write is hard. I am about as skilled with American cursive script as I am with Hiragana.
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My third son is growing up "bi-lingual." His mother is Japanese and I am a native English speaker.
I'm about to become a father (next month) and we also plan on raising our daughter bi-lingual. My wife is German and I'm a native English speaker (and we live in Germany).
I've been reading a great deal on the subject of bi-lingual children, and the most common theme I keep coming across is that around age 3, they're likely to be less skilled than their peers at both languages (so, my daughter's German won't be as good as 3 year old Germans, and her English won't be as good as a 3 year old native English sp
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Different children resist language differently. I have a friend who is Korean and both parents speak Korean to their children. However, their oldest girl prefers to speak English as she thinks English is better... but also, I suspect, she thinks Korean (or her parents) is less cool and does not want to be like them.
I am astounded that my 3rd son never let go of English and even improved his English while away for 6 months. He has always shown preference to me over his mother in many respects and I think
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Not to mention he seems to have come up with a novel way to relate the data. Apparently he wants to use this in other
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is this just a way for a guy to spend five fun years with his kid while drawing a paycheck?
If you could, wouldn't you?,/p>
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In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences.
As a father of three I can tell you that this behavior isn't "unconscious.". When your kids start to say words you will spend hours and then days saying them back to your children, to confirm what they said, to model better enunciation and to just to keep them engaged in a conversation with you. The words "by itself" bit is obvious - "affel" means either "I see an apple" or "I want a piece of your apple";
In my experience this behavior is stupidity. "Affel? Did woo zay affel? Yes you did, yes you did! Heeeeee~"
In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously become retarded.
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I didn't start reading until the first grade. Had teachers tell me I was retarded and that I would never catch up with the rest of the kids. At the time, my options for reading were baby books about jack walking up a hill with his dog, and she was a bitch.
By 3rd grade I was reading at a college level and was given a rule that I had to check out at least 1 fiction book from the library each time I went because my mother was worried that I was reading to many text books.
WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!???? (Score:1)
Oh, er, hang on...
Duh? (Score:2)
Has anyone with kids not observed this?
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My first word wasn't "Dada" or "Mama"... It was "Light". My parents have a home video of the event; It happened to be my cousin Mike's birthday party and my father was carrying me as he turned off the light when they brought in the cake with 8 burning candles. I can clearly be heard saying "Light" as he turns off the switch and seen reaching for the switch, but no one noticed at the time.
A few minutes later they turn the light back on and I say "Light" again. This time people take notice -- They say,
Another slashdot infomercial... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, I for one think that any decent software that can parse that amount of data into any kind of useful and repeatable refined data is interesting.
Especially if it does the vocal analysis automatically... It could be very interesting to analyze peoples speech patterns in any number of social interactions.
I'm not sure it would be GOOD science but fun?
Lets for instance say we have 4 IT admins hanging by the watercooler and the really hot intern walks by and shows his stuff off. Yes, his. I work in a female
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This is nothing new. (Score:2)
Back in the late '60s or early '70s I took a "Psychology of Language Acquisition" course for a humanities distribution requirement. One of the things we were told about was a researcher in the field who had sound-filmed most of her daughter's waking life for several years, to collect such data.
An interesting artifact from that was that the daughter had coined a three-syllable word-like thing that sounded like "ah-WIDdah". (I think it was during the two- or three-word utterance stage.) She seemed to use i
Very Cool (Score:3)
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Having a toddler is often at odds with getting out of the house more. :) That said, I agree with the GP. My wife and I have been in hysterics at some of the things my son says, especially when we have to find a reason to explain that certain words are not things he is allowed to say at school or in front of Grandma (even if she and I are not offended by them), and that that word is not a color with which you can paint your boat.
I think the amusement comes from the conflicts in social expectations. We (as pa
Useful data (Score:4, Interesting)
This is very useful data. We're going to know considerably more about how language really works once this is analyzed.
A few more people need to do this, for comparison and confirmation. It also needs to be done for a tonal language, like Chinese.
Scientist discovers feedback... (Score:1)
How I see the process (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we always learn languages the same way, the only difference between a baby and an adult learning is that the baby doesn't have a first language to fall back on so their need to learn to communicate is greater.
Watching my first kid learn to speak was like watching myself try to learn Spanish. First, was total immersion and a complete lack of understanding. Eventually, there were attempts at copying the sounds; these attempts eventually led into attempts at forming words. Once the vocabulary reached a certain level words got combined to form simple sentences with noises and pointing to fill in the rest. From there, you're relatively close to having a full conversation.
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After a child is first born, they are actually able to hear all sounds made by all languages, and that incessant babbling (you can tell I don't have kids) is actually something all babies do and reflect all the sounds of all languages in the world. These babbling sounds are made up of "phonemes", the simplest amount of sound.
correlation not causation (Score:3)
whilst this is interesting, it is a statistical sample of one family and one family only, albeit a rather long sample. we do not, for example, "modify our sentence structure to repeat more frequently words when immediately learned", but we do find ourselves using words which we know that baby lilyana now knows, in order to more include her in our day-to-day lives: there's a subtle difference.
one clarification: the article seems to be pointing out that it is through speech that the child "trains" the adults (not the other way round), the possible mistaken implication being that it is exclusively by speech that children get their adults to adapt to them. in fact, children do a hell of a lot more than use words to get their adults to do their bidding!
as lilyana is 23 months, we will be leaving it another 6 months or so for her to basically do as she pleases, when she pleases, with us supporting her at every step, so that she gets a chance to see how the world works _without_ being made massively and irrevocably insecure or limited by "no" [except when it's dangerous!].
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While I understand where you're coming from, I have a 2.5 year old, too. She's rarely told no, but often told the consequences of her actions first.
She snapped her hand good with a rubber band a couple of days ago. I told her she would, and she looked at me, at the rubber band, then pulled it back and snapped it. Ten seconds of tears, and off to another experiment to see how stuff works ;0)
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This is another reason why teaching young children (4 year olds are pretty good, oddly enough...) to play Go is a good idea. The learning process of Go is simple:
You QUICKLY learn you can't do certain shit because bad things happen. Then the games get more complex because you play stronger players, less handicap, etc. You know you can't do certain shit, but you start
Poor Kid (Score:1)
I'd hate to be the kid of such a scientist. Imagine growing up and running for public office, only to have "Bobby's Daily Poop Length Chart" show up on the internet.
babys/LSI/w+dog; prepping since forever for this (Score:2, Funny)
the time for 'words' is shrinking? see you at the play-dates. be there or be scared.
we do have some intentions;
1. DEWEAPONIZATION (not a real word, but they like it) almost nothing else good happens until some progress here.
2. ALL BABYS CREATED/TO BE TREATED, EQUALLY. (a rough interpretation (probably cost us. seems like a no-brainer but they expressed that we fail on that one too(:)->) 'we do not need any 300$ 'strollers', or even to ride in your smelly cars/planes etc..., until such time as ALL of the
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Link (Score:1)
wait till he has a daughter and then compare (Score:2)
I did not RTFA, in pure /. fashion, but I'm wondering what would have happened if the author of the study had a girl. Every child develops their language skills on their own individual schedule, however, in my relatively small experience, girls tend to talk quicker than boys. My 18-month boy is struggling to say mama, dada, and banana, while my daughter at that age was stringing together a few words together. My wife's freaking out and is considering speech therapy if he doesn't talk by 2 years of age. My s
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when to go sit in a timeout (a little early to start with timeout, isn't it?.
The modern age dunce cap [wikipedia.org], a wonderful tool for shaping the young minds of today.
reactionary much? (Score:2)
why is this story tagged 'peeping tom'? if we're able to gain deeper insights into human cognitive abilities and language learning skills (which is a crucial part of developing strong AI), the price of privacy is cheap. the whole up-in-arms-about-privacy that people tend to get into is becoming more and more of a reactionary effect these days without them actually realizing the tradeoff and making a decision on a case-by-case basis.
sometimes, it is worth it.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Perhaps you could offer to babysit?
Having a little person who is entirely dependant on you is extremely time consuming. Thoughtful people like yourself who are concerned about their "FUCKING BORING" lives could help out by giving them some free time.
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In any case, unless your advice comes with a free time machine it seems to be of little value.
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It doesn't sound like your friends have an issue, it sounds to me like they're enjoying it so much that they want to share the experience with their friends and family via Facebook.
From the sound of it, you're the one struggling to cope with the fact that people you know aren't focused on entertaining you first, last and always via their Facebook posts.
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Per your interpretation, "coping" must mean "getting rid of" -- a fucking life OUTSIDE, right? There's no amount of "coping" with a 3 month old that will enable you to leave him alone at home and go out for a date. Sure, he may sleep through the night at that age, but would you really want to place bets on that? Babies can get sick pretty quick, you can have a perfectly normal looking baby at 7pm, and a very sick one at 9pm, with vomit/diarrhea etc.
We'd certainly go out a whole lot of our kids could stay at
So that's how they are made (Score:2)
So cam-whores are made, not born?
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Do you mean Freud, as in Sigmund Freud?
I'm still working on "expose the childhood". Do you mean "exploit"? I'm hoping you didn't mean "expose the manhood", then he would not only need Freud, but a good lawyer!
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Given that minors can't give informed consent, and such things are normally signed by their parents, I believe the father in this case IS the authority on whether it's OK.
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How would you get informed consent out of an infant? And I don't see how this is any worse than mom and dad popping in the home movies of little junior taking his first bath -- and showing his prom date.
Fuck 'em! (Score:4, Funny)
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Or you can teach them basic sign language, which the baby is able to do well before they are capable of speech. It's great having a baby who rarely cries because they can make their needs known instead of just screaming until you manage to figure out the problem through trial and error.
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Sounds like a money-making scam to me, but then again I don't have enhanced auditor perception and recall.
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The Simpsons beat them to it [shoutwiki.com]
Here is the better link (Score:2)