Strollerderby : languages

Celebrate St Patrick's Day With Gaelic, For Free

Amy Kuras — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:34:00 GMT

Faith and begorahh! Not that I know what that means! Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Now that we’re parents, the St Patrick’s Day drinkfests of our youth are no more (it is to be hoped, anyway). Maybe some parents whose kids are in school all day can do the “be at the bar at 8 am” stuff, but for those of us whose days parenting young kids coincides neatly with the age of discovering We Can’t Do That Stuff Anymore, St. Patrick’s Day is just another day.

There’s fun ways to celebrate, though. My daughter’s school had a green party, where all of the parents brought in different green foods for the kids to try like zucchini, pea pods, and cucumbers. And we got a cool press release here the other day – the folks at language instruction company Rosetta Stone are offering free access to their “Irish” (really Gaelic) online course through Thursday.

Just go to their site, www.rosettastone.com, and click the link for the free trial. Go through the registration process and you’ll get a link in your email to the software.

It’s very cool and multimedia and a lot more intuitive than the language classes I ha din college. It even helps mak sense out of Gaelic, which seems to be second only to Polish in words that are pronounced nothing like how they are written. The course is very basic but probably wouldn’t grab the attention of a younger kid, although older ones would probably like it.

Best Place to Raise Kids Depends on What Kind of Kids You Want to Raise

LilySea — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:49:00 GMT

In June, an article in Forbes.com offered a top-ten list of the best places to raise kids. The article goes on about the process of selection, but in the end, it seems to add up to “uniformly white and middle-class” when you look closely at both the criteria and the final list. The article even suggests that proximity to shopping malls is a plus, because hanging out in them is important to teenagers' social development.

People in my former town used to say “but it's a great place to raise children!” after gripe sessions about the lack of diversity, over-abundance of fundamentalist churches or minimal opportunities for adventure. But I never agreed. I knew I wanted to raise my children in a city, and the “great place to raise kids” line always seemed to imply, “unlike a city where we adults might find many other things to enjoy but our children would suffer.”

It all depends on what parents want for their children.

Shopping malls aren't on the short list of what I want for my kids. What I do want is for them to feel that art, music and literature are theirs to make and own, not the special purview of a few special people. I want them to speak more languages than English and feel confident as global citizens. I want them to be just two more faces in a sea of friends without a dominant race or other social type. I want them to know that they aren't the only kids in the world with two parents of the same gender; or with parents of a different race than theirs; or who came into their families through adoption. I want Black adults in their lives to give them comfort in their own skin. I want somewhere interesting to go when there are 16 inches of snow on the playground and the wind-chill is negative five.

After their first two weeks in the city, my children have helped a professional artist with a piece for an upcoming show. They have met a dozen kids at the playground behind the loft where we're living and no two are in the same demographic. They have a French-speaking baby sitter and many Spanish-speaking friends and neighbors. They have a membership to the aquarium and have been there three times. There are two playgrounds within easy walking distance and an independent book store with a fabulous children's section and a weekly story hour across the street. True, the cost of living here is higher, but almost everything on that list is free.

When I opened the front door of the art gallery we are living above to a breathless young man introducing himself as “the drunken [expletive] that stole your bench last night” I was struck by how perfectly the event contained both the upside and the downside to living in an urban neighborhood. It seems the young man had a few too many and woke up with a new bench in his apartment. He recognized it as the bench the gallery owner keeps outside to accommodate the community of artists, art fans, neighborhood friends and homeless locals who gravitate towards her place.

I know that for some parents, the potential hazards of drunken revelers on the front steps is not worth the benefits of city life, but for my family, the limitless opportunities for reaching across difference and making friends out of those who might seem threatening at first glance, is more than a fair return for an occasional wandering piece of public furniture.

To Sign or Not to Sign

Mike Adamick (Cry It Out!) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 12:29:00 GMT

My wife has for months been trying to teach our daughter to make the sign for "daddy" by shaping her hand like the letter L and placing it against her forehead. Thankfully it's a sign the kid has yet to master, although she can practically narrate a Mutual of Omaha safari video with only her hands.

Snark if you must, but signing has saved us from some serious meltdowns. At 14 months, Emmeline can only say a few words, but she can hold a conversation nonetheless. We've found it so useful to be able to communicate with our toddler that I'd forgotten there was any signing controversy at all.

Some say it's great for babies. Some say it stunts speech development. And still others say kids should be kids, not streetside mimes.

But if I had the choice between a pre-speaking toddler screaming her head off while grunting and pointing for unknown reasons or a pre-speaking toddler who can calmly use her hands to say, "Milk please!" I'd take the latter in a heart beat. Or at least until she masters that "daddy" sign.

(Here's an awesome signing resource if you're interested.)

Babies Are Wired to Detect Different Languages by Sight

Karen Murphy — Fri, 25 May 2007 12:28:00 GMT

We're always finding out that babies are smarter than we thought. I mean, no longer can we be content thinking that they're adorable little flesh-lumps just lying around and waiting to have some humungous face hover over them, cooing at them just so they'll activate their sensors and wriggle in supposed delight.

Nope, babies think. In fact, they're likely planning all kinds of toddler tricks while they lie quietly in their bassinets, just waiting for mobility and the whining mode to set in so they can drive us crazy. Not that you need proof of babies' obvious sentience, but here's more: babies as young as four months old can distinguish when someone speaking to them suddenly switches to a different language. Just by reading lips.

So I'm wondering, why is this a useful technique for babies to have? Other than the occasional bilingual household, what purpose does this serve? And then it dawned on me: obviously, babies are being trained as dual agents. It all adds up. They're small and relatively difficult to detect (unless they happen to be equipped with a full diaper); they're cute so our innate sense of danger is circumvented; and now they clearly all understand multiple languages without letting on.

Dastardly, evil fiends. Okay, babies, the jig is up! It's all over now; we're on to you! Can't fool us with cuteness ANY.MORE.