We can’t talk to our three-year-old.
Two reasons.
* He doesn’t want to talk to us
In a eerie echo of myself and my parents all those years ago, he’s been ignoring us.
We call him once, twice, thrice, maybe up to 10 times and he pretends not to hear us. Mind you, these aren’t even occasions when he’s done something wrong and he doesn’t want to face the music.
These are perfectly out-of-the-blue instances when everybody is hunky dory and we want to ask him about what he’s building, what he’s drawing, whether he likes something. Civil dialogue. Which turns rather ugly by the time he fails to even look at us at our tenth “Day!” because obviously, we are turning blue.
Typical teenage behaviour from an about-to-turn-three-year-old boy.
What do we do?
I go up to him, look him in the eye and tell him that if he wants us to listen to him, he has to listen to us. Deaf ears, really, but I keep trying.
What I really want to do is to slap him senseless and ignore him for the rest of the day.
* He can’t quite talk
This is the more worrying factor.
Because I think I could understand him better when he was two, than now.
He doesn’t speak properly.
Of course, I understand when he says “Ma-yee, wa oh there” to mean “Mummy, what’s over there,” but who else will?
It’s not a vocab issue; sometimes he does opinionate in nice complete sentences which make us go “oh so cute”.
But by and large, in the last few weeks or so, he’s suddenly grown marbles in his throat.
He struggles to get the words out, giving guttural “ah, ah, ah’s” and blinking very rapidly like there’s some broken connection between his brain and his tongue.
And when he does speak after 20 seconds or so of trying, it comes out so quickly with all the consonants clipped off, only a mother could understand.
He gives up, too. When I go “Pardon?” nowadays, he shakes his head and clams his mouth shut.
What do we do?
Frankly, we’re not quite sure here. We don’t know if the problem is physiological or psychological.
KK orders him to speak clearly but this is one of those things where, I think, awareness may worsen the problem.
3 comments:
there are instances where kids are growing rapidly in their brain system that too many thoughts ran through their mind in one time that they have difficulty articulating it.
and with his limited vocab to express himself, he got himself tongue tied.
and thats where parents and child give up.
go for a paedi for advice, otherwise, more patience?
God Bless.
Hey, I've got a wild thought. Just popped into my head, not even sure if there's such a thing. But are children confused by accents? Maybe he's hearing same words spokenly differently?
fresh fry: no paed, more patience for us!
jo: doubt it. he sounds completely singaporean, goes "no, what" all the time, which makes us realize how completely singaporean WE sound cos' we're the only ones he picked it up from.
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