I first learned about reinforcement learning and then I got to watch kids (not in the scary way). I blew my mind how similar they really are in that they just spew out nonsense and see what sticks.
Conditioning (operant and classical) is THE learning process. After understanding that dogs', pigeons', and chimpanzees' brains are using the exact same process as us, it really makes you realize that we're way more similar than different.
You don't have to say yes to and encourage EVERYthing. I've noticed this is/was a myth in some places more than others. In first grade I lived in Canada (rather than Europe), and I asked my teacher if I had spelled Jamayka correctly (I had not), and instead of telling me how to spell it he just said "good job" . Not an isolated thing, people would look at the 100th squiggle their child "painted" and go "great job that's soooo good!!!!" as if the child would suddenly lose all will to live if they offered some improvement ideas.
It's definitely beneficial to interact with and include your toddlers as much as you possibly can, even if they aren't contributing much. It will accelerate their motor skills and help their speech to explode before many of their peers. My wife and I can often tell when children aren't interacted with by their parents, either through lack of communication or by being raised by a fucking tablet instead. There are exceptions to this of course (like autism), but it's very sad to see how many children between the ages of 2 and 5 are trailing so far behind the others due to uninvolved and disengaged parents.
My daughter has a lot of kids in her pre-school that are the same age as her, and they have an extemely simple and broken vocabulary. Their parents come to pick them up and don't engage with them whatsoever. Just quietly stick them in a car and usually hand them a device.
I suppose that's the unfortunate different between people who wanted kid and people who simply had kids.
I wonder how many false autism diagnoses were are from kids not having enough interactions at a young age? I was diagnosed with a learning disability, which today would absolutely be called ADHD/autism and the "extra help" only gave me an intelligence complex. I would rather have been held back then held to the lower standard that I was.
baby doesn't have clear words yet, but he has body language and gesture, eye contact, prosody, shared attention, the give and take pacing of interaction. baby has picked up a good deal about how casual, comfortable conversation with the guys or a close family member works!
Ooooh learned a new word, thank you! Prosody: the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry. I see how you used that to represent the way the baby was copying the sound pattern of his dad.
i have learned something as well. it's a word that's familiar to me in clinical context, i had not really thought about it as something linguists and creative language-smiths are thinking about until looking it up just now. 🙂
