From the Crib to the Community

Children won’t take in what you tell them until it makes sense to them. Other people don’t simply shape what children do; parents aren’t the programmers. Instead, they seem designed to provide just the right sort of information at just the right time to help the children reprogram themselves.

The interesting thing is that even quite tiny children, just beginning to say their first words, already seem to be influenced by what the people around them are talking about. And, of course, the parents are exercising this influence completely unconsciously, just by talking to their babies.

It turns out that, just by the nature of the grammar of their languages, Korean- and English-speaking parents talk about the world quite differently. Korean (like Latin or French) uses an elaborate system of different verb endings to convey different meanings. As a consequence, Korean-speaking parents can, and often do, omit nouns altogether when t