It’s exciting when kids start saying words. My daughter was an early talker, and combined with her petite stature we got plenty of amazed stares when she would speak to people in public. My son also had the propensity toward learning longer words a lot faster than other kids his age. At an early age he once told a lady that something was “enormous” and when she looked at him with a shocked face he sympathetically said, “That means big.”

Despite their early verbal skills, I still worried that maybe they weren’t learning how to speak exactly as they should. I think most parents do like I did; they alternate between being incredibly proud of their kids’ new speaking skills, yet worry that any little thing may be an indicator that there is something cognitively wrong with their kids’ learning ability. Yes, it’s normal to worry about these things, so don’t beat yourself up if you find yourself hypervigilant.

What is Generalization?

Let me help you with one thing you may be worried about when your child starts talking: generalization. This is the term that is used to describe how many young children label things in lumps. For example, all four legged animals might be labeled “cat” by your child, or every woman may be declared  “Momma.” Most kiddos do this when they are first learning to talk, and not only is it completely normal but it’s expected.

This is simply one of the ways that young kids use what they already know about the world to interpret new things they experience. Think about it; if you encountered something new you had never seen before, you would probably try to relate it to something else you already know in an attempt to understand it. Young children just don’t have as extensive a history in world experiences, so the generalizations will seem more, well, generalized.

So if your new talker declares a horse to be a cow or a desk to be a table, don’t fret. It’s just another one of the many verbal and cognitive steps your brilliant child will go through.

Up until a few years ago, I have been very against allowing my children to watch television. I never purchased movies for my oldest daughter who is now fourteen until she had reached age four. While television programs for children had come a long way from my childhood, I was still skeptical of so called ?educational television? and DVDs.

Today I had a chance to review a Baby Einstein DVD. Rather, I should say that my children had a chance to review it. I allowed this because thanks to advances in educational programming, children are learning more from DVDs and television than in years past. I must admit, I am glad I popped this into the player. Recipient of an American Baby Best of The Year Award, it has been voted as a product moms say they can?t live without. After viewing it with my children, I can agree!

Baby Einstein, Baby?s First Sounds-Discoveries for Little Ears is a fun, lighthearted DVD for babies aged 6 months and up. The program introduces little ones to sounds, the basic sounds of speech that we use everyday. ?Ah?, ?buh?, ?duh?, ?ee?, and ?mm?. Each sound is then connected to a simple word, easy for the child to understand especially if they are older than the 6 months stated as beginning age. My youngest child is eighteen months, but he loved every minute of this DVD. I was pleasantly surprised to watch and hear my little man imitating the sounds on this DVD. Unlike his sister who is 3 years old, he has not been using words strung together. He says one word at a time with some trouble on certain sounds. Key sounds being reinforced in a fun way with puppets, songs, and rhymes seemed to have a great impact on him.

His older sister, my 6 year old happens to be autistic and has some problems with certain sounds, much like her younger brother. She also enjoyed copying the sounds during the run of the DVD. For parents of children with special needs, I highly recommend the Baby Einstein, Baby?s First Sounds DVD. It appeals to children who love simple scenes and repetition.

The DVD is divided into 13 scenes, each accompanied by a song, sonata, or quartet. Most of the classical music is Mozart which has been suggested to help with intelligence development. Music is enjoyed by nearly all children, regardless of the impact on their I.Q. and this DVD has plenty of it for them.

Four bonus features are included, including a sneak peek at another DVD, Einstein Pals.

Build self-esteem and self-confidence. Strengthen rapport with peers. Increase empathy, sensitivity, the whole package of emotional connectedness. All these you can do by simply exposing your child to other children. Expose them early and they will be less jumpy, frightened, or angry when strangers are near. Train them well enough to recognise whom to trust and whom to be careful around and you help establish a child’s stable sense of self in relation to others. Lock the child away, limit his playtime with other children or interactions with people, and you just might be planting the seeds of paranoid behaviour and insecurity in him.

When it comes to teaching your child to relate with others, they are no different from any other warm-blooded mammal that roams the earth. They need to interact, to mingle, to develop their relational skills in order to lead healthy and emotionally satisfying lives. It is a world where one is constantly in contact with another, where one needs to be relating to others, transacting business with others, merely co-existing with other people. The sooner you start your children on the journey of discovering not only their inner traits but their abilities to reach out and communicate with others, the better you equip them to deal with what we would like to call the “real” world, aka life-on-your-own.

So savour those invites from pre-school or kindergarten, as well as those from the local government, as when our local city hall sent letters to all 5-year olds (children born in 2002) to join in the annual tree-planting on the outskirts of the city. It was an excellent opportunity to not only have our son mingle with children his age (he did run into some of his classmates from school while lugging around his shovel), but to also support the natural instinct of the child to want to nurture a life into fruition. Play time was not as fun as this when I was 5; I was busy shimmying up the neighbors’ trees instead and getting chased out of backyards.