Let’s talk about food. First, name it: milk, broccoli, oatmeal, carrots, chicken, eggs, cereal, and cake. Then name how it smells: smoky, pungent, sour, sweet, burning, baking, barbequing. Then name how it tastes: sweet, bitter, salty, spicy, hot, sour, garlicky, fruity, and acidic. To learn a new word a child needs to hear it (while seeing it and tasting it) from 8 to 16 times. So talking about food is a good place to start, because everybody has to eat every day. And bab

Most babies love to nurse and drink from a bottle, but some do not. For a baby it is the beginning of having an opinion. A baby can refuse to suck a bottle and only suck while at her mother’s breast. She can suck with strong, hungry, slurps, or pull her head away, or stop and start with distraction while drinking milk. A baby does not have the words for her kind of nursing, but a mama does. A baby lets her know by asking for more, and spitting out what she doesn’t like. Ma

There are so many words to use in a kitchen, it is hard to know where to begin or end. A mom will need to save some of the kitchen words for the next time. First, every food has a name. Then there are the tasting words, smelling words, temperature words, fixing and cleaning words, recipes and utensils. Then there are the liking words and the hating words (yum and yuck, more and no, so good, and thank you). Name it. Taste it. Smell it. Fix it. Make a mess. Clean it up. Eat, ea

Our website appeals to mothers to talk more to their children, but we’d never want to leave out dads, uncles, aunts, grandparents, childcare workers or neighbors. Children need loving adults of every relationship to talk more to them. One reason we titled our website, Talk to Me, Mama, is that we thought that women and mothers do talk more to children. _________ Nuestro sitio está dedicado a las madres para enfocar la importancia de hablar con sus hijos, pero no queremos dej