So this is going to be about hang-ups of middle class people like me, so you’re welcome to leave if you’re just tired of hitting reads about people’s gripes in this life blah blah or blogs whose authors like to talk about themselves like there’s never gonna be tomorrow.
All righty then, I was just wondering whether I made a mistake in telling my househelp to speak in English whenever she talks to the little kid. Last night I heard her say “Where’s your baybs [beybs]?” She meant “bib” of course. But how’s the little kid gonna know that? I was worried about the little kid picking up wrong pronunciations and now it seems that it was perfectly reasonable to have trivial worries like that. This is the first time that my househelp has been in Manila, she came four months ago and she came with a Visayan accent. Not to belittle or humiliate in any way our friends from the Visayan Islands but you see, I am an English teacher — or at least, was, and I refuse to have my son speaking bad English.
And this is where the “hang-ups” part comes in. You see, I want the little kid to learn English from the cradle and so I had planned on imposing that everyone speaks in English (whether or not they’re talking to the little kid) when they are within the little kid’s hearing, the very moment he comes out of the hospital’s nursery. Kinda like “English zone”, so to speak. But anyway, since we stayed at my in-laws immediately after our hospital discharge, I couldn’t foist rules like that. Not, when we’re not even in our own house. And so I had been lax the first month that we have been staying there, but the minute we arrived home, I morphed into this insanely prudent prudish mom whose vocabulary consisted of “yes, sir”, “yes, ma’am”, “please” and who insisted on speaking in straight English to the little kid.
But kind sir, I do not think that I’m doing the country dishonor. I do simply want my child to grow up globally competitive. OK OK, so maybe I am, but the thing is, I learned a lifetime ago from developmental psychologists’ point of view, that a child may have speech delays, obviously brought about by confusion, if spoken to in different languages. But hey, I’m ditching “delay” right staright in the bin in favor of “developing great capacity to master languages”, or so recent studies claim if a child was exposed to many languages. These studies though do not discount speech delays, so I guess it’s a choice, eh?
And that’s why I asked everybody to speak English when speaking to the little kid. But while the little kid’s nanny can speak basic, simple, passable English, the help cannot. [And that's why it's totally impossible to ask everyone in the house to speak English ONLY whether they're talking to the little kid or not!]. But with the “baybs” incident, I don’t know, I might as well feed the little kid to selective mutism phobics.
What say you?
