Ever since my daughter began to hold her head up, I’ve been trying not to say “Good job!!!”
My actual job involves ridding corporate communications of cliché and jargon, and yet I talk to my toddler in the language of SMART goals and measurable results.
I’ve tried to be like the British and say, “Well done!” or just a measured, long-O drawn-out “Goooooood.” But the phrase that pops out of my mouth is “GOOD JOB!” Like being a baby is work. Like she’s on track for promotion.
(And I might even be shooting myself in the foot: Beyond training kids to expect applause for routine tasks, “good job” praises product over process, which stunts a growth mindset.)
At the same time that Julia is learning to talk, I am looking at language in a new light. For a writer, this unexpected gift of mindfulness isn’t something I expected from what passes for conversation with a one-and-a-half year old.
Take the use of the word “good”, for instance. If thrown around too much or in the wrong places, she could begin to associate it with a value judgement over who she is rather than what she does. And if I use “good” only when she does what I want, then what does that make her when she chooses something different that might be an authentic expression of who she is?
Or consider the Montessori method of avoiding the overuse of “don’t” or “no.” The idea is to reframe directives as what you want them to do, such as “sit in your chair” instead of “no standing on the table.” Apparently, if you say “no feet on the table,” the part a toddler hears is “feet on the table.”
This has borne out in practice, and aligns with the context vs. content rule of writing: The final words of the sentence are what you want the reader to retain. In daily life, however, it involves a surprising level of reprogramming.
Once I read about these verbal tactics, I noticed how many doors I was slamming shut in her face. With a slight shift, her world opens up with possibility.
Toddlers, like the rest of us, become inured to overused words. A frequent “no” will soon become background noise, a soundtrack akin to the teacher’s voice in Charlie Brown. A “good job” will become mindless praise, one that doesn’t recognize the specifics of the effort involved.
So is saving “no” for when she’s about to drop a watch into the dog’s water worth the spend? Or should I reserve it only for when she walks directly into the sea?
While I consider, her words lap up and spill over like waves. “Careful!” she says in the voice of my mother while proceeding to do something dangerous. “ALL DONE,” she bellows when she is finished with her bath or breakfast. In a bid to push past bedtime, she deploys tricks of memory, like listing different kinds of trucks, counting by twos, or saying “bye bye” to all the people she knows, even some surprising ones, like my sister-in-law who lives hours away, or my best friend who visited for a night. In the morning when she wakes up, she has started repeating the last words of everything I say. So now who has to be careful?
The world will have many messages for her about what she can and cannot do, who she should be, and what is valuable about her.
At home, I hope she will already have learned how to create her own definition.
"Like being a baby is work. Like she’s on track for promotion." hee! (also, I'm now picturing Julia in a tiny blazer and tie carrying a briefcase filled with Cheerios)
"Like being a baby is work. Like she’s on track for promotion." hee! (also, I'm now picturing Julia in a tiny blazer and tie carrying a briefcase filled with Cheerios)