Have you ever seen an adult who’d speak to their one-year old child without «baby talk», just as to a person?
I have never seen any. I am not speaking about Russians – they have their own mechanism, different from that of Europeans: while their children are considered too young, the Russians talk to them in unrealistic baby talk on the verge of cretinism, and then – when the kids grow up – they change to prison trash talk – threats, insults, etc.
Can we expect that the mentality of an individual will form in a normal, natural way, if all (!) the surrounding people see him as a moron, communicate with him as a moron, convince him that he is a moron? A child adopts literally everything from his parents, including the habit of being an idiot, which takes its roots in baby talk indeed.
I believe a child should be communicated with as an adult from its very first day of life. Moreover, the concept of “first day” is somewhat vague, because we know that a child’s brain is formed long before the moment of its birth, and besides, it stays in a cave-like uterus and, in addition, is surrounded by water, which conducts sound 4 times better than air does – it means that being in the womb a baby perfectly hears everything going on outside. Of course, up to one year of age (approximately) it will understand little or almost nothing, but there is something it understands wonderfully, namely, intonation. Every dog lover knows that it is possible, strangely enough, to talk to a dog, and if you see a dog lover talking to his dog as a person, do not hurry to take him as a madman – maybe he went out of his mind, of course, or maybe he is observant enough to realize that the dog very sensitively perceives not the meaning of words but their accompanying intonation and reacts quite consciously and emotionally in response. What can we say about children?
Continuous bombardment of children with “baby talk”, idiotically mangled words, depriving them of normal human communication, and all this in the age when they so easily absorb everything – I would define this as psychic sadism, even if unwitting, even if out of stupidity. I would define this as aggressive stupefying, as mental castration of a child. And that means such violence against children should be prohibited, along with physical violence.