It sometimes seems that the entire first year is racing towards the six key milestones culminating in walking unassisted. And then the second year everyone asks, “Is she talking yet?”. What seems to be missed are all the everyday actions she’s learning that we need to survive on our own in this world. The rate at which she’s learning is stunning.

Let’s see if I can just start with some of the things I’ve suddenly realised she knows how to do without really noticing when we taught her:

• When undressing her for the toilet, she holds on to something and then she lifts her legs one at a time to help us get her pants off.
• She will go find her shoes, bring them to us, sit down and have them put on, then goes to the door and points until we let her out. She will then push the screen door open, walk to the step, carefully navigate to the wall and hold onto the wall to help her balance while she steps down.
• She holds her own toothbrush and tries to clean her teeth. She also tries to brush her hair.
• If we stand her on her step-stool in front of the sink, and run the water for her, she puts her hands under the water, then rubs her hand on the soap, rubs her hands together, waits for us to run the water again, flicks the water off and then gets off the stool and dries her hands on the towel (I think her Dad taught her this one while I wasn’t there, but it’s still a pattern she now repeats and knows).
• If we go to a park now, she knows how to launch herself from the top of a slide and loves it and she wants to swing on the big swings.
• She knows about buttons and switches — she can turn lights on and off and has figured out that pushing the Walk request button on the street needs your whole hand.
• She understands about context — some of her signs now mean different things in different places, like patting a lap means “I want to get onto your lap” whereas patting a bed means “time to lie down”.
• She has started using the “all done” sign to mean “no” as well, and you can now ask her a series of questions to try and elucidate what she wants.
• She can build a tower of blocks that goes about six blocks high, predictably. She can manage eight blocks from time to time.
• She high-fives, fist-bumps and can do “slip me some fin, noggin!” (from Finding Nemo, a small hiccup on our road to avoid merchandise, methinks) but is yet to utter “Dude!”. (Okay, these, we’ve taught her.)
• She can climb up and down from the couch and our bed.
• She uniformly holds books the right way up now. (This one was subtle. I’m not sure exactly when it started.)
• She can drink from an open cup, although she needs to be reminded to use both hands from time to time.
• She can close doors and lids and knows that’s what you do with them. She is constantly closing the front door if we leave it open by accident. She puts rubbish in the bin and slides the lid closed. If she notices we haven’t closed the lid, she will close it for us.
• And lastly? She has worked out how to turn on my iPhone and launch an app. Talk about an intuitive interface! When she first started trying to slide that non-existent slider, I was amused. When she succeeded, and almost updated my Facebook status with dnfjfknj I realised it was time to put in a code lock. As it is, she punches numbers until it tells her “wrong passcode” and then hits “emergency call” because she knows that goes to a screen that’s more fun…

In rare instances, you get to watch the learning process first hand. In the bath the other day, I turned the taps off. After a while, I had washed her hands and they were soapy. She stood up and went over to the faucet. She held her hands under it but I didn’t want to wash her hands that way when there was a full bath. She tried pressing the faucet. She looked under it to see where the water came from. She patted underneath it. She frowned and might have been remembering what it was I’d done because next thing she tried was turning the cold tap on!

They say you need to do something 1000 times before you learn it. As adults, we look at that and groan; it seems like endless, boring repetition and it seems almost impossible. Watching a toddler practise putting a shirt on with Mama’s help, and then lifting their own arm, and then starting to get their arm into the hole on their own with the ultimate conclusion that they too will one day put a shirt on with no help, it’s just obvious. 1000 times? At twice a day, that’s only a year and a half. I’m confident! Let’s go!

As adults, most of us have lost this simple fascination with practise, with continuous improvement. We expect to learn everything instantly or at least quickly. A colleague recently refused to join the rest of us at a work outing to an ice rink, saying she’d tried it a couple of times and was hopeless at it. It takes months of practise to get walking right the first time. Why do we think we can learn a new way to do that in two days?

If nothing else, parenting is teaching me more patience than I ever imagined I had. More than that though, it’s teaching me the joy of learning again. Oh yeah, that’s something else my daughter does now: applauds every time she achieves a goal she’s set herself.

For those who are going to weigh in about how my daughter will rebel and that girls just like pink or that just wait, she’ll want it when she dresses herself… a) hmmm, funny, I never did and b) I’m not banning the colour from the house, just refusing this bizarre world in which pink is the only colour girls can wear. A few months ago, my little girl had grown into some clothing we’d been given and I reluctantly dressed her in it. Her first pink stuff. Stripey hot pink and orange pants (they look better than that sounds) and a hot pink jacket from someone else. Surprisingly, it looked good. And then I took her out into a world where every other little girl was wearing pink and remembered why I have a problem with it. Have you been into a mainstream clothing shop for babies recently?

It’s about limiting her options. Already. It’s about telling her she can’t have the rainbow. I want to raise a girl who believes she can do and be anything, just like the posters said on the trains when I was growing up. I fear that I’m living in a strange retro world where feminism didn’t happen, despite the fact that I’m working and my partner is not the only man at playgroup, so clearly it did. However, as the slogan goes, I’ll be a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy and we ain’t there yet.

I’m not quite as intense as the Swedish couple who are concealing their child’s gender from anyone who isn’t changing the nappies. I do however understand where they’re coming from. I gave my child a gender-neutral name, partly because I had heard about a study where people were less likely to hire a person based solely on whether their name sounded male or female. I wanted my first interaction with my baby to be non-gendered (it didn’t turn out that way because of an anaesthetist who spilled the beans, but the intention was there!). If this sounds like overkill, then you might be someone who has never been uncomfortable with your gender.

I remember reading in Sandy Stone‘s book about her gender transition that some psychiatrist insisted she wasn’t serious about transitioning when she turned up to a session wearing pants. She had to point out the window at the vast majority of cisgendered women out there dressed exactly as she was. And yet today, we have exactly the same double standards about what “femininity” is. When Caster Semenya won a race by too great a margin for a “woman”, she was subjected to a raft of sex tests (and let’s not get confused: it was her sex and not her gender that was in question; her gender identity was clearly female or she wouldn’t have been entering a women’s race). That’s all odd and challenging but when it got offensive was when YOU magazine gave her a makeover: apparently, you’re “really” a woman when you wear make-up and a dress.

Some will say that the Semenya case demonstrates clearly that there are differences between “men” and “women”, that even the small amount of extra testosterone from internal testes gave Semenya an advantage. Well, sure. No one is denying that certain biological characteristics lead to certain practical outcomes on average but these tiny differences, in relative strength, speed, stamina, what-have-you are blown out of proportion through a lifetime of socialisation.

Recent studies have shown that when parents thought they were dealing with girls, they were more likely to describe the child as happy and socially engaged and more likely to underestimate the child’s physical abilities — even when the child was actually a boy they’d been told was a girl. As Sharon Begley explains, in her review of Lise Eliot’s book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, “Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens.”

I can only imagine that such perceptions lead to a long-term distortion of minor differences, as girls are interacted with as if they are more social, thus becoming more social, and as their physical activity is limited for fear they will hurt themselves and they slowly internalise the message that they are not as competent. When we measure “innate” sex differences in adults, it is the result of this long-term conditioning we are measuring. Begley again: “How we perceive children — sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains.” (It’s worth reading the whole article; Begley succinctly summarises Eliot’s findings. There’s also an interview over at Salon with Eliot which isn’t as good as it could have been.)

The other book doing the rounds at the moment is Nurtureshock by sociologists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. I’ll leave the bulk of my thoughts on this book for another post but one interesting idea from it relates to how we over-reward our children for underachievement and how that actually undermines self-esteem. I question the phrases we use: how often in a day do you say “good girl” or “good boy” when what you really mean is “brave girl” or “clever boy”? And how often are we, through this, disguising the different things we praise boys and girls for? One alternative approach is Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting. Another book I haven’t actually had time to read, I understand the concept to be that you eschew all criticism and praise and instead just reflect back to the child what they did: “hey, you rolled over by yourself — now you can reach your toy. Hey, you knocked over the milk — now, we’ll have to clean it up.”

While we had trouble doing this consistently, we have done our best to switch to describing our daughter’s actions and affects. It’s amazing how often I now think hard to work out why I think something is praiseworthy — was she adventurous? canny? strong? Would I think those things were praiseworthy in a boy or would I expect them?

I care about this because I want my daughter to grow up confident and capable. I want her to be free from the debilitating disease of self-doubt that seems to afflict almost every woman I know, no matter how competent or high-powered. I worry that she will be one of the few girls in her generation to have those attributes and once again, I worry that my efforts to help her be a strong individual will mark her out as different in a society that colour-codes every toy, every item of clothing and even the pages of the catalogs, just in case we were to mistake a practical toy that encouraged spatial play as suitable for our girl, when obviously, she should be playing with the pink cleaning cart clearly marked “girls only” on the packaging.

Rule 1. Talk to your baby as much as possible.

Talk to your baby as much as possible. Some believe that this interaction starts in utero, while others say it starts the day baby is born. A child needs to hear the sounds and intonation of their native language in order to learn them. They also need to hear it from you – not from recordings, radio or television. So talk to your baby, read, or just keep up a running commentary.

Rule 2. Say things that are true, meaningful and appropriate.

Say things that are true, meaningful and appropriate. Whether or not baby understands what you are saying, there is at least one person who is listening to every word – yourself! Between providing bubs with a “babble channel” and the sharp reduction of adult conversation which is unavoidable in early parenthood, you don’t have the time or capacity to have a separate internal intellectual life.

Your baby-talk becomes your self-talk. What you babble to baby is (or becomes) exactly who you are. If you only babble meaningless drivel, this will crowd out the thoughts you could have been having if you were silent. So please, babble at great length about your politics, opinions, how things work and the meaning of life.

Rule 3. Don’t be sarcastic, rude, cruel, patronizing or in any way disrespectful to the child.

Tone of voice is perhaps more important than the actual content. When you explain something to a child, they will often respond to the tone of voice alone. However, creating that tone without the appropriate words is incredibly difficult, but creating it with the words is pretty much automatic.

Habit-based behaviour is essential to building the capacity to parent effectively. Thinking is incredibly resource-intensive. Parents can’t afford to risk our children’s safety on the assumption that we will notice a critical moment or have the time and energy to think about the issue when it comes up. We are constantly pre-empting situations, controlling the environment and bedding in habits. Therefore, the only rational baby-talk habits to develop are ones based on the assumption of the child understanding what you are saying.

Don’t be sarcastic, rude, cruel, patronizing or in any way disrespectful to the child. Do I even need to explain this? It’s about the habits we form. It’s about self-esteem. I hope this is pretty obvious.

Rule 4. Be beautiful, positive, prolific, imaginative, loving, kind, generous and clear.

Songs and rhymes are great. There is plenty of room for nonsense rhymes along side your more intellectual babble. Love of language, as developed in this way, is an important basis in the child’s learning to read.

Rule 5. Use correct language and grammar.

Use correct language and grammar rather than bastardised language or “in” jokes. And yes, this is harder than it sounds, as common language is very lazy. But if you can manage to use correct language with your child is young, she will have this fantastic resource of being able to access what “sounds” right, without ever having to explicitly learn the rules of grammar.

Are you nodding at how self-evident my rules are, or wondering if I’m a bit daft? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Now let’s be quite clear: any time you start talking about cultures, it’s a delicate task. It’s very easy to step from measuring something that’s occurring to projecting it or assuming it, and biological determinism (where you assume that outcomes are inevitable given certain genes or race or gender) is a common trap. People get edgy when you talk about measurable social effects because they assume you are being prescriptive rather than descriptive and people who recognise the social background you are referring to as theirs are easily offended by generalisations. This is as much true as those defending a place of privilege as it is those touchy about their perception of themselves as having come from an underclass.

It reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell‘s discussion in Blink where he talks about the effect of survey questions before tests. Ask a child if they are black before the test and the child will perform more poorly than if you do not ask. And also of the discomfort Gladwell evinces when he reveals that he, as a person of colour, shows up as prejudiced against black people on the Implicit Association Test. People don’t like talking about race and class. It’s a touchy subject.

With all that in mind, the phrase that caught my ear was Nisbett’s comment that a three-year-old child of professional parents using a qualitatively more complex lexicon in speaking to their parents than a “welfare mother” uses in speaking to her three-year-old child. There are many caveats here: note that this is America he is speaking of and so welfare is something very different than here in Australia where just about everyone has used government benefits at some point in their lives; note that he does not say that the active vocabulary of the child is larger than that of the adult but simply that the vocabulary used in this particular task is more complex, that is, the “welfare mother” dumbs down her language for her child.

He also mentions that by the age of three, a child of professional parents has heard 30 million words, a child of working class parents has heard 20 million words and a child of a family on welfare (again, in America) has heard 10 million words. Of course, this doesn’t account for the quality of the words, but based on the television/spoken language study and the number of TV hours in American households, this doesn’t surprise me. I’ve traced these figures to research by Betty Hart and Todd Risley. It’s pretty comprehensive.

As parents, my partner and I listen to this and naturally think about our own parenting and our own backgrounds. I am the daughter of a librarian and a business owner; my cultural background is Jewish, which strongly values learning and academic achievement. I talk to our child constantly and I talk to her using adult words. I have laughed at myself telling her what an ignominious position she finds herself in on the change table sometimes. My partner’s mother had what Americans call “an eight-grade education”. His father worked as an engineer, but was also from a working-class background. He was never read to as a child. My partner finds it much more challenging to talk out loud to our daughter.

Both of us instinctively want to foster intelligence in her, though. We hear this discussion and take on board the suggestions for improving confidence and test scores — tell the child their intelligence is in their control, praise more than criticise. Intelligence is a status item in this world: it leads to a certain type of success, as defined in a consumer economy and governed by people who, in the West at least, tend to be lawyers before they become politicians. However, if pressed, most parents would say they want their children to be happy above all else.

So, is this a logical desire, our desire for intelligence and success? That depends who you believe. Some argue, in fact, that happiness leads to success, rather than the other way around. But happiness correlated with intelligence? Sorry, no. In fact, it seems that happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. There’s an argument for the opposite, which is that for the general population, high IQ is negatively correlated with mental illness (well, except for Ashkenazi Jews, bad luck for me — it seems I conform after all).

If happiness is random but can lead to success and intelligence is a commodity that is valued in society and (for the general population) leads to lower incidence of mental illness, I think it’s something to pursue.

And if it’s as simple as actively talking to our kids, using adult language instead of baby talk (it’s impossible not to do it in motherese; I’ve tried), and encouraging the child to think about their skills as self-determined, I’m all for it.