Building a Genius Baby.....One Language at a Time

When I was pregnant with our first child, my husband and I started reading about language development. One of our books said "a baby can potentially learn as many languages as you can imagine". This set off crazy expectations in our minds. We started to try to figure out a way that our children could learn Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, French and Japanese. Of course we assumed that our baby would pick up English quite easily. We bought tons of books in foreign languages.....at least two for each of the languages I mentioned. We were sure that our children would be multilingual because they would be exposed to all these languages.

We were wrong! While all these books and tapes were probably entertaining, they did not really help our children reach any real type of proficiency. What children really need for language development is interactions with people of that other language. This is how they truly learn....by interacting with somebody of the other language. This interaction is somewhat a slow process that takes time. Although we still believe that our children will be multilingual as adults, we realized that being multilingual should be a long term goal. It was not quite as easy to have our children learn a foreign language as some of the books we read.

We realized that we should let our children be children instead of trying to make them into multilingual geniuses. We bought into the pressure of always trying to give our child a new skill that will make them ahead of the class. The funny thing about this is that more recent articles have discussed how it is truly the children who had imaginative free time who really excel. It seems that making your child read early or learning their numbers early only gives them a temporary edge. In the long run, children who were not allowed to be children usually feel burned out. As they get older, they lack their own motivation truly needed to succeed. Children who had more laid back childhoods tend to have more imagination and eventual drive to succeed.

Does this mean we as parents should stop trying to educate our children? Of course not! This just means that we should try to find experiences that will spark our children’s curiosities and let them experiment with their environment on their own. Helping our children to be successful is like the hare and the tortoise. Slow and Steady