Talking to Babies

I know a lot of guys feel awkward and dumb trying to talk to babies and toddlers. (Let’s face it: we often feel awkward talking to women, let alone little bundles of flesh who don’t talk back).

But I always kinda enjoyed talking to the kids when they were pre-language. I didn’t make gaga-googoo noises. I actually talked. I think it helped build the tremendous rapport I still feel with both boys from those first moments. And though they didn’t understand it when I asked them existentialist questions, or practised my Khmer (Cambodian) on them, or sang them the instructions off the wetwipes box to the tune of Sesame Street, they liked it.

I read this article today at Raising Children Network which gives some tips for talkin’ with the baby. They actually say I should have been making googoo-gaagaa noises instead of speaking normally but – eh! – my kids turned out ok.

I think.

Talking with your kids even from in the womb will build rapport and will also stimulate their intelligence. According to another article:

The more you chatter using words, the better their vocabulary and communication skills will become. “Babies under 12 months pick up the intonation and warmth in the voice and listen to the tune of your conversation,” says Professor Silva (professor of educational psychology at Oxford University). “And from one onwards, your child will be sensitive to the words.”

It might be hard to imagine that squirming non-verbal little urchin is actually taking something in, but give it a go, New Dad! Talk to em. And besides, as they grow older, you’ll never get that captive audience thing happening with them again…

Wednesday’s What’s Worse?

Yeah, it’s petty. Yeah, it’s negative. But heck – we all love to gripe about stuff. And I find plenty to gripe about in my normal life and now that I’ve been sick for going on eleven days, I’m in a particularly negative mood…

So once again, I thought I’d share a couple of my pet peeves and get your thoughts on which (if either) you find worse. So, what’s worse?

• plastic coffee lids that seem tailor-made to dribbling coffee onto your shirt or pants?
• salespeople and cashiers who put the notes in your hand first THEN the coin; or
• getting a phone call right in the middle of your favourite TV show?

[Can I add another one just for me? That moment when the phone HAS rung in the middle of dinner or that favourite TV show, you ask your wife to leave it, she answers it then says "It's for you". . . Ok, ok, I'll take it up with her...]

The Dangerous Book for Boys, and more…

Written in the style of the “Boys Own” literature, this book has a nostalgic (1950s) feel to it. Reading it is like reading a very long “Annual” or magazine: you find yourself flicking through for the most intersting articles.

Many of the articles (or chapters – which range from one to ten pages long) simply weren’t interesting to me, or my boys. The subject choice is rather random, which means hit and miss. Some of the “misses” were Common British Trees and Making Crystals. Australian, South African and New Zealand readers will be as irritated by all the Northern Hemisphere astronomy, geography and sporting references as I was.

Having said this, there were many chapters that were interesting and quite a few that I found very helpful.

The interesting ones included:

• Making a paper water bomb
• Making tripwires and pressure plates (SO many applications for this)
• Famous battles, 12 of them (including the Alamo and the battle that the Spartan movie 300 is based on)
• A Brief History of Artillery (what boy doesn’t like pictures of Trebuchets and cannons?)

The helpful ones included:

• Rules for Chess (this settled any disputes Oldest Son and I have over how to play)
• Pen & Paper games (I’ve been trying to remember some of these from my own childhood and now they’re back! A nice alternative to the Nintendo Wii)
• Table Football (ditto; I had forgotten this game but the tournament in the Aldin household begins in earnest tomorrow)

And here’s the real test: while many of the chapters don’t grab my boys at all, when I first got the book, it fell open to the page on paper airplanes and Youngest Son was all over that, with great enthusiasm. (I even made my first paper plane that actually worked!) Then Oldest Son grabbed it and read the section on Codes and Cyphers.

I reckon the chief value of this book was to introduce stories and activities that add diversity to my kids’ love of Video games and CGI movies. Its secondary value was in being a resource more reliable than Wikipedia the lads can to turn to for school projects (& I can turn to for help on rainy holidays).

Finally, my very favourite quote from the book(in the chapter Advice About Girls): “Avoid being vulgar. Excitable bouts of windbreaking will not endear you to a girl.”

[To which my response is: "Yeah, but what can you do?"]

(I found out that you can even download a 14 page excerpt of the book to see if it’s for you.)

***

While I’m in a reviewing mood, 3 (of my favourite) older movies that my 11 year old has enjoyed and 3 that he thought sucked eggs:

Cool:

1. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (go figure!)
2. The Karate Kid
3. The first live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

Suck:

1. King Kong (the 1976 version – and he has a point)
2. The original Planet of the Apes (1969)
3. Superman (Christopher Reeves style)

Don’t bother trotting the last 3 out with hopes that the kids will like them…

Ten Word Movie Reviews

Taking a leaf out my friend Markk’s book (see Five Word Coffee Shop Reviews), I thought I’d do a quick review of 3 “kids” movies I’ve seen this year + a rating…

1. Spidey 3 – Venom will scare little children, romance will bore everyone else. (9 out of 10)
2. Meet the Robinsons – Script written by monkeys randomly putting words together; raw sewerage. (0 out of 10)
3. TNMT – A boys flick, great CGI and story, needed more Mikey! (7 out of 10)

Human Dominoes

One of my favourite ads set to my favourite tune from the early 80s.

No I don’t have shares in this beer…

What’s this have to do with parenting? Nothing.

More Ten-Word Movie Reviews

Given the monumental success of my last lot of ten-word movie reviews (thanks to the two or three people who read them), I thought I would do some more. Here’s four of my recent views, reviewed…

1. WILD HOGS – Laugh-out-loud funny; Gay Cop unsuitable for kids though.
2. THE DARK KNIGHT – Ledger, legend! Sinister, mean, complex and violent - this film rocks!
3. V FOR VENDETTA – (Where’s Hugo?) Loved the story; but definitely not for kids!
4. BENCHWARMERS – Best vehicle I’ve seen for slapstick, fart jokes and idiocy.

Canine Proofreading

When Youngest Son was even younger (around 4 y.o.), we were walking the dog one day and he asked, “Why do dogs do wee (urinate) everywhere they go?” I explained that they were leaving messages for other dogs to say they’d been here.

Another time he asked “Why do dogs sniff trees all the time?” “Because they’re reading the messages left there by other dogs. It’s kind of like email.”

Armed with this rich understanding of the ways of the world, my son was satisfied. He said nothing more on the topic for the past 4 years, except the occasional “I wonder what she’s writing” when we’d walk our dog and she’d pause for a moment …

Yesterday, the budding stand-up comic watches the dog taking a leak in our backyard (as you do when you’re bored). He turns to me and says “I know why dogs sniff their own wee when they’re finished. They’re checking back over what they’ve written. And if they see a ‘b’ where there should be a ‘d’, they-” and here he mimes a dog cocking its leg – “rewrite that part.”

Don’t Do This…

Here I am building a “cubby-house” (or more likely a lean-to) for my oldest son about two years ago.

I’d been reading about how pre-teen boys need to engage with the outdoors and some have the instinct to build shelters to prove to themselves they could fend for themselves. It all sounded rather plausible and when my son came to me asking if he could build a “cubby” in the backyard, because his friend Nathan had just done that in his, I was all for it. We went to see a friend of mine, a carpenter, who kindly made some suggestions about what materials and even gave my son (and me!) a crash course in building and construction. We assembled the materials and went home to build it.

I know what you’re thinking: “What a great Dad! Giving his son space and encouragement to do it. And look at his rippling muscles in that picture as he even gets involved with the project. I wish I had a Dad like that.”

… actually, you shouldn’t wish that.

From the start, this project was undermined by two of my tendencies that I battle constantly:

• the need to be seen as a great Dad (see it even showed up above in this very post) – particularly by my kids – and
• the need to teach things … actually, let’s call that last one what it really is: the need to micromanage (to direct or control in a detailed, often meddlesome manner).

Things first came unstuck when I told him, no you can’t build it where you want to, you have to build it where I want you to. At first pass, this might sound like a good thing, and – look – if he had wanted to build it on the roof of our house or nail it to my wife’s car, then fair enough, I should say no. But he simply wanted to attach it to the back fence. I didn’t like that and said, no build it over here.

The next problem came when I stayed outside to assist him instead of going into the house and leaving him to it. Now, my excuse was he asked me to stay, specifically to hold the beams while he hammered. Again, good dadship to be there for him? But alack! and alas! I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut.

When he said “Dad I can’t do this!!”, struggling to get the nail into the wood, I could have said, “Yes you can; keep at it champ.” Sometimes I do encourage him this way. But not this time. I could have said, “This wood is pretty hard, it’s probably not suited to this. Do you want to finish what we can with the other pieces then go out and find another piece that’s easier to work with?” That would have allowed him to stay in control and saved face for him. I could have said that but I didn’t.

I said, “Let me have a try.”

Those 5 little words resulted ultimately in the photo you see above. Where is my son in that photo? Nowhere. (My other son is taking it). Oldest Son has by this time gone inside frustrated. After twenty minutes of rising tension about how to do things, he’d thrown a mild tantrum and given up. Because whereas I thought I was communicating “I’m here for you”, what he heard was “You can’t do it, give a real man the hammer.”

As usual from little things, big things grow. From my small action – well TWO small actions – discouragement flourished.

The results: four planks of wood loosely nailed together in my backyard and sitting there for months like that, a boy who lost interest in building things and a Dad still kicking himself.

You might say all sorts of things like, “The boy should have had thicker skin” and such. I seriously don’t think this one was about him being oversensitive. I think I truly screwed up.

The lessons for me were twofold:

1. be careful not to communicate to a boy that he can’t do ‘it’
2. be careful not to discourage a kid from a passion of theirs in any way

Sometimes kids need to be allowed to make a mess of our backyards, to risk putting a crack in our fence palings, and even to try-and-fail without being shown “how to do it properly” (especially by someone like me who really didn’t know how to do it anyway.)