My Family and Other Globalizers | The Kahlil Gibran in every child

Kids don't have all the words yet, so it's easy to dismiss them as having nothing much of importance to say. But there is a clarifying wisdom in how they see the world. (Representational image: Arty via Unsplash)

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.

There is an unwritten anthology that resides in the brains of all parents, made up of the misheard and mispronounced words of our children. These can range from aww-adorable, to the downright hilarious and even the oddly profound.

When my older son, Ishaan, was about four, he bounded over to me after listening to a Bob Marley CD and solemnly pronounced that his favourite song was Gruffalo Soldier. A few years later, his brother Nico arrived home from school agog with information from a geography lesson. “Did you know, Mama?” he asked me, his eyes round like saucers, “There is a country in Africa called Bohemian Fatso.”

When they were little, the boys jumbled words. Ishaan called buttons, buntons and christened all churches, turches. Nico’s favourite colour was “lello” and he also enjoyed exploring the secrets of the “nuniverse”.

“My dreams are thinkative,” Nico told me groggily early one morning. “It’s hard to rememorize so much,” Ishaan complained of his piano sheet music.

Also read: My Family and Other Globalizers | Learning “incompetence” from our children

Good parents are supposed to correct these errors. To gently model the correct words and their pronunciation. But for our family, tangled tongues have been a way of life. Over the last two decades we have lived in five, linguistically distinct countries. And much of our time has been spent learning, baby-like, to make sense of sounds; to name the objects around us anew.

It’s a wonderous process to begin to understand a new language. Like seeing a blank screen slowly fill up with things and colour as you get to grips with nouns and adjectives and pesky verbs.

Over the decades I’ve grappled with Chinese, French, Bahasa Indonesia, Japanese and Spanish. Every time I begin the journey with a new syntax, I become aware anew of the power inequality between those who speak well and those who are learners. The inability to say interesting things, not think them or know them, but to express them with casual felicity, is an automatic demotion in your perceived value. Lacking the right words strips you of the cultural capital that allows those well-endowed with it to inhabit the world with confidence.

Swimming with unfamiliar words means that you know what it is like to stutter and choke on the sidelines, while others hold centre-stage. It is to understand the truth that people who cannot speak “well” can still be worth listening to. That by making the effort to understand someone who is struggling to express themselves, you do more than a mere kindness to them, you open yourself up to the possibility of learning.

Learning new languages has helped me, as a mother, to realize the benefits of listening to my children. Kids are little and they do not have all the words yet. It is easy therefore to dismiss them as having nothing much of importance to say. But there is a clarifying wisdom in how they see the world.

I used to write down all the things my boys said when they were little, and I suggest, dear reader, that you do too. It’s easy for their aphorisms to get lost to us in the daily drudgery of raising them.

Here’s a smattering from my records:

• Ishaan on western classical music: “Mama, it doesn't know how to talk!”

• Nico over breakfast: “Mama, I need to take my dark glasses to school, or the summer will get into my eyes.”

• "I want to be friends with trees and rainbows, even though they aren’t mammals," says Ishaan. "Because they are so quiet."

• Nico grabbed my hand in such excitement today, he was literally trembling. He dragged me to the window and pointed. "Look!" "What?" I asked, distracted thinking about all the many things I needed to get done in the day. "Sun!" he beamed, showing me the sun. "And look!" He pointed in another direction. "Flower!" I looked at the frangipani tree in the garden and realised all that stuff they say about learning from how children get such pleasure from the simplest, most everyday of things, is profoundly true.

Every child has an inner Kahlil Gibran. Get down low and close enough to them, listen with attention and you might just hear the words you’ve always been waiting for.