[dzolob]

I just sang, sang, sang anything that came to my mind. About mountains, clouds, courage, poo… It was just love pouring out of my heart, and I don’t know if it had something to do with it, but my kid started talking very early on and very well.

The best thing is was that I got to know him very soon, while my peers and their daughters/sons still were kind of communicating.

[mattlondon]

It seems to vary a lot in my experience. I have two kids who basically got the same treatment. One was eloquently talking in coherent sentences of 4 or 5 words by 18 months ("plane in the sky", "teddy come downstairs", "want something to eat" etc) and was understandable by others outside the family, the other kid was barely able to grunt single words at the same age ("mukk" instead of milk, "nur-sa" instead of nursery etc) that only we really understood as it was just incomprehensible sounds to everyone else

Singing made fuck all difference in that case (FWIW, the grunter is now totally fine as an older kid). Both were walking at 10 months so it was not like one was just "slow" at their milestones

As they say, every baby is different.

[pstuart]

Yep. Having more than one kid disabuses us of the notion that our parenting was the driver in how awesome the kid turns out.

That said, I believe it's nature and nurture in the end.

[e1g]

Same here, two kids and zero strategies that worked with one apply to the other. Might as well be raising a dog and a dolphin.

[CSMastermind]

> Might as well be raising a dog and a dolphin.

That made me chuckle.

But it's possible for siblings not to share any genetic material right?

A brother and a sister would obviously get different genes from their father and presumably there would be a 50/50 chance of them getting different genes from their mother.

There's four unique prototypes of children any two people can produce together.

[harry_ord]

> But it's possible for siblings not to share any genetic material right?

Kinda but the mother always provides the mitochondria.

[CSMastermind]

I think that's an area of open research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1810946115

But yes, that's a good distinction I should have made!

[caseymarquis]

I thought it was more like 2^23 unique prototypes?

[darkerside]

Four prototypes?

[danwills]

Gamete cells get a random half of all genes from each parent so there's about 2 unique possible 'sets' from each parent, and 2*2=4. However because it's random I think you can only say there are 4 distinct completely unique possibilities in theory, but it would be very unlikely for that to actually happen in practice.

[fsckboy]

>Four prototypes?

gp said four unique prototypes

[rand0mx1]

Probably genotype. Isn't it

[tbcj]

My experience as well. My two are so different it’s hard to even parent at times as they need different kinds of attention. You can’t really give yourself in different ways at the same time. We recognize that one - being born in the lockdown environment - is likely different in meaningful ways than our first. Our first is helpful in she almost recognizes a difference.

[jascination]

Same. Have twins (fraternal) and their milestones are completely different despite pretty much identical treatment all things considered. They're also naturally better at certain things (twin A better at physical milestones, twin B better at social milestones).

[pstuart]

Fraternal twins as well -- night and day.

[Loughla]

We talked constantly to ours. Not about anything in particular. Just narrating everything we did. Constantly.

Our oldest was talking in full sentences at 1 year. It was astounding. Now, granted, it was stuff like, "I'm dunna det da fwad" but he was communicating in full thoughts at about the time he walked.

People always asked what system we used for teaching him. Our answer was always, "it's boring at our house so we talk a lot."

[gardenhedge]

Everyone talks to their babies a lot. What does "it's boring at our house" mean?

[jacobolus]

> Everyone talks to their babies a lot

Most people talk to their babies at least sometimes, but observing families there are huge differences between how much people talk to their babies, how they talk to them, what subjects they talk about, how many different languages they use, etc.

[gardenhedge]

Is this your observations or a study?

[jacobolus]

This is my observations, but there are also numerous studies demonstrating this if you go looking. For instance, a 2m search turns up https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440540/

[EGreg]

If they have a lot of siblings there is even more speech

[2Gkashmiri]

I have a family with a lot of kids. Their neighbour was living with his small family somewhere else for a year where their kids had the sibling and grandparents to talk to.

The younger of two had speech problems.

Then they returned home and the neighbour kids made both of them to talk in a matter of weeks and months.

[EGreg]

So is this confirming my point? Sorry, I am a bit confused who made who talk etc.

[Loughla]

It's a joke. We live in a very rural area. So there's not much going on. We also don't do personal consumption devices (tablet/phone) in the home.

[jeffbee]

According to the article it would seem to be a matter of just throwing in as much variety of tone, inflection, and articulation as you can manage. The don't understand what you're saying anyway.

My career as a singer-to-babies was heavy on the Broadway tunes. "On the Street Where You Live" was big.

[ghostpepper]

There is something magical about hearing a toddler mumble out an entire verse of Fly Me To The Moon or Autumn Leaves

[starcraft2wol]

Being better than your peers always brings a warm feeling.