Subliminal Learning

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The importance of watching what you say in front of your baby…

On the weekend I was talking to a friend about words that her daughter has been using – and I’m talking about the kind of words adults sometimes use but don’t like to hear from our children.  Although she and her hubby had been conscious to stop saying those words in front of their daughter, it seems she has picked them up through some means unbeknownst to them.

What I suspect is that their daughter remembers hearing them when she was younger and deemed “too young to remember”.  It is easy to assume that young toddlers won’t remember words that you use, especially when they can’t really speak yet, because they don’t repeat everything that you say.  Since they don’t repeat it, we naturally assume such words have been missed by our children.  In reality, what happens in that absorbent sponge for a brain is that the word gets stored only to be used at a much later date when we are all dumbfounded by how they learned it.

My aunt once told me that when her grandson was really little, she used to call him her “hunny bun”.  After a while she stopped using that term of endearment and she never repeated it again.  When her grandson was older, she asked him out of the blue, “Who’s my hunny bun?”  Her grandson replied, “Me.”  She was so surprised that he remembered because she thought he had been too young to remember the words.

Likewise, there have been incidents with Gavin that have surprised me.  Little games I used to play with him when he was supposedly “pre-aware”, that he seems to remember.  Even the manner in which he uses sign language suggests that he remembers the signs I tried to teach him from when he was younger which I eventually gave up on thinking he wasn’t learning anything.  I started playing the Baby Signing Time DVDs for Gavin when he was 5 months old.  I suspect it is his familiarity with the music from his early babyhood that makes the songs such a hit with him whenever I play them for him now.  Sometimes when he gets a little difficult in the car, I find that playing the Baby Signing Time music CDs can help to calm him down a little.

I guess it is never safe to assume your baby is too young to remember…

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