At a Loss for Words

Every once in a while, a news story comes along and makes me feel better about a parenting shortfall on my part. Last week, the one that made me sigh and say “Oh, phew” was a posting on NPR’s Shots health blog. The headline read: “Parents' Ums And Uhs Can Help Toddlers Learn Language.”

The article was based on a new study, published in the journal Developmental Science, found that the occasional stammering and fumbling for the right word that the average harried parent does won’t stunt our children’s verbal development. In fact, our pausing to hunt for a word helped the toddlers in the study learn how to infer things, to hear a trigger word like “um” or “uh” and realize that they were about to learn something new.

This comes as a relief to me, because it seems like at least once a day since my second child was born last May, I’ve had a conversation with my daughter where I briefly haven’t been able to hold up my end of the discussion. She’ll ask me a question in the kitchen after work while I’m simultaneously cooking dinner, feeding her baby brother and fetching her a slice of cheese, and I’ll find myself tongue-tied over simple words, probably because I’m multitasking and my brain can’t juggle one more thing.

Lucy is sweet, so she’ll wait patiently for me to find the word that has temporarily escaped me. It’s nice to know that in my effort to do it all, and in her kindness in humoring me, I’m not stunting her vocabulary. I expect she’ll start finishing my sentences any day now.