What Kids Say

Olivia is now the age that she is saying the most hilarious things. Good and bad. Some include,

“Holy cwap!”

“What the devil?”

“Mami! Come here NOW!”

“You did a great job, Mami.”

It’s hard to keep a straight face when these words come out so passionately of a 2-year-old’s mouth. Sometimes I laugh hard and sometimes I’m doing my best poker face. Now she’s starting to, very seriously, tell me what to do and what not to do. My first reaction is, “Olivia you are not allowed to tell me what to do.” However, when I think about it, she learned this. Everything they do they learned from someone and it’s usually us, the parents. All the things Olivia is saying right now she learned from me or Luka or her favorite movie.

Recently, her new thing is to just not listen when I say, “Come here.” This happens in parking lots, grocery stores, everywhere. I get it. It’s normal toddler behavior. My approach to addressing this was never to punish her. As long as her safety wasn’t an issue, I would call her once and if she may not have heard me I call her again. Then if she doesn’t respond I immediately walk to her and say, “Olivia, I called you and now you must come. You can walk on your own, but if you do not come with me right now then I will pick you up and take you.” She wants to walk on her own so she gets very upset if I pick her up. When her safety has been in question I immediately grab her up and very seriously tell her, “It’s not safe to ignore me! You must listen!” So then the other day as I am getting ready to leave, doing my makeup in the bathroom, when Olivia storms up to me and says, “MAMI! You didn’t come and now I have to grab you!” Now, I’m working hard not to crack a smile because in her mind this is very real. “Olivia, I only talk to you this way when we are in a very serious situation. Otherwise, you may not talk to me that way.” I can’t blame her for this. She sees me do it, so why wouldn’t it work both ways? I want her to do as I do when I say “I love you” and all those good things. It would be unfair for me to punish her for this. She is learning how to communicate and she learns mainly by imitating what she sees and hears.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been living in a foreign country and learning their language mainly by immersion that I really get this. After taking several language courses, including an intensive course, I see a major difference in the way we learn language naturally and how we’re taught in a classroom. We don’t naturally learn language and communication by memorizing vocabulary lists and verbs in all their forms. We learn first and best by simply listening a lot and then repeating what we think we hear. At first it’s messy, at first it’s not pronounced right, but it’s enough for the other person to understand us. Kids learning how to communicate do exactly this. Maybe that’s why I have a lot of understanding and compassion for Olivia. I see myself struggling in Slovene. I don’t see it as she’s being naughty or disrespectful, even if she were to use a really bad word. I see it as her communication skills are developing. It’s not my place to punish her, it’s my job to guide her.

Learning a new language is always hard. Learning your first language must be even harder. This is where I put myself in her place and think, how would I want to be treated? Instead of always looking at her mistakes as things she needs to fix, I want to look at them and ask myself, “Did she learn this from me?” and “How can I be a better teacher? How can I help her understanding and development?” Most of the time our kids lack good teachers, not disciplinarians.