Breaking the Bondage of Shyness and Fear
Shoshanna was shepherding two small children the other day and noticed that when the little fellow, nearly three years old, asked for something, he reverted to baby talk with a whine. His parents often ignore his requests until he resorts to pitiful baby talk, at which time they are provoked to respond.
So, when he is making a request, he has learned to bypass the preliminaries and get down to language that moves people to pay attention to him—baby talk.
When he came to Shoshanna with a request for water, his body language changed. He slumped and swayed as if in a near fainting condition; his head rolled and hung to the side. He pulled on her dress, and when he spoke, his speech was slurred and babyish. He said, “I una dink a wotta.” She asked, “What did you say?” He repeated, “I onna dink a watta.” With no emotion, and a slight note of rejection in her voice, Shohanna said, “I am sorry, I cannot understand you when you talk like that. You will have to speak plainly.” She sounded as if she was giving him one last chance to make an intelligent request before she turned to more important matters. He straightened up a little and tried to speak more plainly. When she saw that he was making a sincere attempt to act his age, she took that for compliance and helped him by asking, “Are you saying you want a drink of water?” Her accent was decidedly English, overly articulated. He watched her mouth stretch into the different shapes as she carefully pronounced the words, and he understood what she wanted him to do. He tried it and was much clearer in his speech. All the slump and drag went out of his body language as he tried to imitate her dignity. Without further ado, she turned to give him his drink of water.
This is a good opportunity to point out something that is easy to miss but so very important. Note that when the little fellow made a sincere effort to change his tone and conform to her leading, Shoshanna immediately gave him his request. She did not take that opportunity of compliance to lecture him on the importance of speaking correctly. He had taken responsibility to yield to her leading, to rise above slovenly habits. If she had rewarded his correct response with a reproving face and brief lecture about speaking correctly, all her efforts would have been in vain, for a three-year-old child has a very short attention span—about three or four seconds. He cannot see the relationship between two events that are separated by thirty seconds, but when two things happen together, the child relates them to each other. It only takes one touch on a hot surface for a child to make the correlation and not touch it again, but if the pain had a thirty-second delay, the child would never make the connection. He would keep touching it and keep getting burned.
