12th Month Update: Not Babbling Yet

This video talks about how kids who learn a second language, or who are brought up bilingual, develop in terms of brain function, cognition and social development. It answers the question: are multilingual kids "smarter" than monolingual ones.

It is the twelfth month of life for Juju and things have really taken off in terms of his gross motor and cognitive development. Last time I talked about his pointing, and it's not only continued, he seems to be communicating to us whenever he points. How so?

I went online and did some research on this particular milestone, pointing. According to psychologists in child development, pointing, by virtue of its referential function, has been characterized as a kind of behavioral stepping-stone to symbolic reference (Bates et al., 1975; Butterworth, 1998). In fact, Franco and Butterworth reported that in their study, infants who pointed did so only in the presence of other observers, what they call the audience effect.

Pointing normally develops at approximately 1 year of age, (exhibited by more than half of the human infants in most studies of pointing) and it's been said to be a precursor to speech. Now, I am not the first parent who's worried that her child is not developing speech "on time", and you would think me ridiculous, since Juju is by standardised testing, ahead of schedule. Well, I also know that plenty of people claim that these "standards" of child development shouldn't be taken seriously (that's only because their kids didn't fall outside of the developmental time tables). By the 12th month, Juju should be babbling. Ah, what is babbling?  Online, tons of speech therapy websites describe the complicated nomenclature in baby babbling, but Ju does none of it. The more alarmist part about advising you to bring your kid in to see a doctor if he isn't doing it by the 12th month is found on all 4 sites I visited. I decided to ignore it.

Psychologists who studied human infant pointing say that it is accompanied by linguistically ambiguous vocalizations from approximately 8 to 21 months of age. It's not surprising, since the kid IS trying to tell us something, and as noted by Butterworth (1998), pointing frequently accompanies naming behavior in humans, especially human infants and their primary caretakers. Ju would mostly point and grunt "huhh" or look to me with a surprised expression on his face and then do his hand signal, which we interpret as "not there". So the past few weeks Ju's pretty much been saying, "The fan!" "The light! It's not on, why is it not on?" "The coffee machine! I want to press the buttons on the coffee machine!" "What are those? I want those!" "I flung the cup outside, look! I don't have it anymore!"

The most fun part about this stage is Ju's ability to understand words and signal that his comprehension, in three languages. He knows the German, Chinese and English words for fan, light, coffee, car, bird, ball, dinosaur, cup". We know this because we test him all the time! Aside from pointing at the objects when we ask him where they are, I place three random objects like the toy car, cup and ball together and ask him for one of them. When his attention is focused, he'll pick the right one. I don't know what exactly he knows in English since I hardly use it with him, but he's starting to pay attention to pictures, so we try to teach him those objects (usually animals) in his books and his playmat as much as possible. The only problem is there is only so much we can teach him given the limitation of time and opportunity. When Ju acquires language naturally and in a natural setting (daily activities, exposure to various people and places), he would acquire the three languages in different degrees.

I was consoled at least by one researcher, Amy Vaughan Van Hecke, assistant professor of psychology at Marquette University in Milwaukee who said that "children who pointed at a year old were less aggressive and more outgoing at two and three". She thinks the behavior paves the way for children to ask for and get what they need instead of acting out or withdrawing.

Well, let's see in a year then when Ju hopefully will speak!

11th Month Update: Pointing and Walking

Gross Motor

This month has been amazing!  Ju is 6 days shy of 11 months and it seems like he's been walking forever. I can't really remember when he started cruising or taking the one or two tentative steps before toppling over. But this month his development is off the charts.

The first milestone is of course walking. He seems to be more efficient at it now, as his balance improved and unless he really needs to get someplace quickly, he would toddle over like a little boy who's had too much to drink. Of course he took a few harrowing spills, most recently onThursday when he fell on his face and his teeth cut him a little and there was blood. He bawled like a baby for a few minutes but we calmed him down with an amusing toy. I almost fainted from the sight of the few drops of blood in his mouth, like, I literally had to out my head down because I was really gonna faint! But thank goodness there was no damage, his teeth were intact and he later sucked on his fingers as if to swallow the blood. Eew.

The other thing he's been doing is pointing. It's the most adorable thing, he points at everything, especially the things he wants. Best of all, it's a great tool to test his vocabulary. Check this out:

Me: "Juju, 风扇在哪里?" Ju points to the ceiling fan.

Me: "Juju, clap your hands." Ju claps his hands.

Daniel: "Juju, wo ist der Ventilator?" Ju points to the ceiling fan.

Me: "Juju, 拍拍手!" Ju claps his hands.

Me: "Juju, where is the fan?" Ju points to the ceiling fan.

Communication

Which brings me to the third development: our trilingual experiment is working!  His German grandparents taught him to respond to the question Wie gross ist der Juju? He would willingly reach up his arm above his head. So I got my Mum to teach him the English version and my Dad the Chinese one. Now, we all take turns asking him in three languages (with control questions interspersed in between of course, as in the above example) and he pretty much gives you the same response to "How tall are you?" and "Juju 你多高?"

Apart from these phrases, Ju also waves when he hears "Bye Bye" but not so much to "Tschues" or "再见" which we don't use as often as the English term. So I've begun a more systematic socialisation regime. We would all chip in and teach Ju one set of nouns and verbs at a time, depending on his interest. Currently it's birds and light switches. So we would repeat the same sets of related words every day when he points at the sky or the lamp: "The bird! Where's the bird? In the sky! Let's go see the birds."

And I would do it in Chinese: "鸟鸟! 鸟在哪里？在天空中！我们去看鸟. 你看!  一二三只小鸟."

It can be somewhat tiring because you're still not getting much of a response from your baby at this stage, apart from grunts and grins when you flip the light switch on or point to the dog walking past.

The other really amusing thing he's picked up is turning both hands out in a shrug, as if to say: "I don't know" but where Ju means "There's no more" or "I don't have it". He usually does this when he flings a toy out of reach and can't get it back or when he's eaten up his snack. I have no idea how he learnt to do this, but I recall one evening when he finished his cookie, I used my hands in this gesture and told him, "没有了" (no more). And he imitated my gesture right away! I burst out laughing and so did he (he usually laughs when you start laughing at him, it's like an infectious thing). Since then, whenever he hears us saying "没有了" or "no more", he would generally make that gesture.

It seems that at this stage, physical mimicry is dominant, as Ju is also able to mimick other gestures even if he can't verbally speak yet. One afternoon, Daniel and I were testing the remote controls on the air-conditioners in the house. The aircon in the living room didn't seem to switch on and we were both pointing remote controls at it, as well as in the other rooms. We thought nothing of it until the next day when Ju picked up my phone -- it is white, like the remote control, and about the same size -- and pointed it at the air-conditioner! Since then, he's been pointing TV remote controls at the ceiling every time he gets hold of one. It's hilarious but we also realise that children are observing us very, very closely. Maybe even our non verbal cues are being picked up. It's imperative that we be very careful around the baby, particularly when we're angry or emotional.


Sleep and Feeding
His sleep is still problematic. Ju sometimes goes to bed without a bottle and I give it to him at around 10pm when I go to bed to make it last through the night. However he needs the bottle at times before he would fall asleep at 8pm. This means no bottle at 10pm and maybe it's related, maybe not, he would toss and get up throughout the night, three or more times. His mattress lies next to our bed, for easy access, and I admit after 3am in the morning, we give up and plonk him in bed with us to he would stop fussing. This doesn't lead to restful sleep, oh no. Last night he continued to toss around like a basketball and I got several kicks to the face before he went under. At times, his body was positioned like the dash in the middle of the letter "H" (between Daniel and me) as I got squeezed precariously to the edge of the bed. Obviously, we've got to go back to the brainstorming room for this one.


Ju eats everything. And I mean Everything. Fussy eating has no place in this family, I can tell you, though trying to feed him can be trickier than playing Grand Theft Auto. He won't stay put in his high chair for long and when he starts yelling, we have to take him out. This is followed by a high speed, obstacle-laden chase around the living room with a spoon. I used to regard parents chasing their kids around, spoon waving, aiming for the little mouths in between their hyperactive scurrying with condescension. "Wimps!" I would label these adults who couldn't control their offspring and make them stay put for a meal. How wrong I was and how I've had to bite on every little snarky judgement I've made about hyper children and coddling parents.


Don't get me wrong, I still believe in independence training, not molly-coddling and all that "western" parenting jazz. It's just that reality is a totally different ballgame and one so-called method of control or discipline is not going to fit all, or fit your child even if you want to adhere to it like an unbending priest. Teaching Ju (I prefer to call it teaching instead of disciplining since that implies attitude problems) is a really slow, uphill task that involves understanding what he wants, where he's coming from and figuring out from experimentation and observation the reasons for his behaviour.


I prefer to see it as a science, a series of continuing experiments in getting it right with Ju. Some strategies may work, and sometimes it is just a puzzle why a behaviour is persisting. He is an ever-changing psycho-emotional-physical phenomena! Parenting someone as exuberant and irrational as this one-year-old marvel is going to take careful observation, persistent experimentation and creative innovation, and a whole lot of tolerance for mistakes. I am not aiming for perfection as a parent, because I want him to grow up learning to do all the stuff I've just described, and I hope I will be able to do just that.