"That is a cow. What does a COW say?"
Silence
"A Cow says MOO!"
"This is a pig."
Cutie Pie crawls away.
"What does a Pig say? Hey Cutie Pie! What does a pig say?"
BANG BANG BANG! Cutie Pie plays with his blocks.
"Never mind."
Many of the Baby Instruction Manuals I have read stress the importance of teaching your child animal sounds at this age. They say it is a great game for mother and child. They describe an attentive baby gazing adoringly at his mother and answering all the mother's questions with precious baby animal noises that he learned on the first try. Yeah, right.
I've heard Cutie Pie make some animal sounds but I don't think he did it intentionally. I've heard him oink like a pig when he was laughing so hard he couldn't stop. I've heard him gobble like a turkey when he told me about his day. I even heard him bark like a dog once, while looking at the dog. It was probably an accident but it was still pretty cool!
I can understand how teaching your child letters, numbers and colors will benefit him in the future. Even if the kid isn't going to be an athlete, he needs to develop motor skills so it's important to play ball and climb all over the place. But for the life of me I can't figure out how learning animal sounds will benefit him at eight months of age. He likes it when we make funny sounds at him. But I'm worried that I've been saying MOO MOO MOO for so long that he thinks that it's a Mommy sound, not a cow sound!
Why on earth is it so important to teach your child animal sounds? Maybe if Cutie Pie lived on a farm and often came into contact with a variety of animals, learning their sounds would be helpful. Perhaps if Cutie Pie lived a long time ago when the world was a dangerous place full of predator animals, he would need to learn which animals to avoid. Cutie Pie lives in the suburbs. When is he really going to have a chance to have a conversation with a cow or a pig? Are animal sounds going to be on the SAT eighteen years from now? If so, I think we're all in trouble.
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