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...parenting tip of the moment
[Schlesinger writes] Some mothers...introduce a world wherein things that are seen, touched and heard are enthusiastically processed through language. The world they introduce is wider, more complex, and more interesting to the toddlers. They too label objects in the perceptual world of their children, but use correct labels for more sophisticated percepts, and add attributes to them via adjectives. ...They include people, and label the actions and feelings of individuals in the world, and characterize them via adverbs. They not only describe the perceptual world but help their children reorganize it and to reason about its multiple possibilites.
These mothers, then, encourage the formation of a conceptual world which, far from impoverishing, enhances the perceptual world, enriching it and elevating it continually to the level of symbol and meaning. Poor dialogue, communicative defeat, so Schlesinger feels, leads not only to intellectual constriction but to timidity and passivity; creative dialogue, a rich communicative interchange in childhood, awakens the imagination and mind, leads to a self-sufficiency, a boldness, a playfulness, a humor, that will be with the person for the rest of his life.
quoted from
Hilde S. Schlesinger in "Dialogue in Many Worlds: Adolescents and Adults - Hearing and Deaf", quoted by Oliver Sacks, and Oliver Sacks in
"Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf"
by Oliver Sacks, page 67
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