To correct my toddler's speech (nicely)

[glitterjellybean]

NC for this. I have a dd coming up for 2 years old. She's bright and happy and her vocabulary is coming on in leaps in bounds.

Her df and I see eye to eye on pretty much everything except one thing. Speech.

Bit of background, and as much as I hate labels, dh is very working class (as in he's a total grafter with a common accent) and I'm from an upper middle class family where I was corrected to say the full words and names not abbreviate. If my mum heard me say the word "telly" she'd come back from the dead to tell me off 🙊.

It started off when she was small with my utter refusal to the whole "say taaaaaa!" thing. She now says please and thank you anyway, so it seemed unnecessary for her to learn two ways of saying it.

Now this last week "yes" has turned into "yep" and I keep (gently) saying "no xxx we say yes".

Dh thinks I'm being stuffy but I've never been turned down for a job in my life because I speak (in his words) "posh" and I'd like to give our dc as much of a chance as possible in life.

Dh is constantly getting annoyed because people judge him on his accent and the way he speaks, and we even had an incident in a posh cafe the other week where a patron made a comment loudly about "letting anybody in now". So surely if he's had issues like this he wouldn't want his kids to go through the same.

Lol this is a bit more detailed than I was expecting but as long as I'm doing it kindly and constructively (and not in a way that's demeaning) it's not a bad thing to speak "correctly"?

And 'yes' to your third and fourth lines

If I identify myself as MC am I playing into that?

There is a good body of evidence showing that correcting children's speech slows down their development of language skills, quite apart from the shallow, judgemental attitude it demonstrates.

I haven't read the whole thread and am ignoring the minefield of any class issues. You don't need to correct their pronunciation you could just echo back the correct pronunciation. "I want wa'er", you reply "You want water, shall I get some?" No direct criticism necessary, no indirectly implied, 'My way of speaking is better than yours.'
It may seem a little thing but eventually when DC gets a little older they'll start writing and they'll write what they believe the word to be, sooooo many children at my school believed 'because' is written 'cos'! Whilst the world doesn't implode they are surprised to learn the full word.

It makes sense not to play along with something you know is wrong in much the same way you probably wouldn't just smile admins nod when they tell you 1 sweet and 1 sweet is 27 sweets.

I'm aLondoner, and from what many would see as a working class background (my dad was a builder.) My dad was Irish and my Mum was a Londoner of Irish descent. My dad (obviously) had an Irish accent, my Mum a 'nice' London/Home Counties accent.

My Mum, while not overly pushy, always wanted us to do well for ourselves and this included us speaking properly. I've got a London accent, bordering on Cockney. My sister did have one but grew out of it. My brothers have got accents more like my mum. Some of this may be explained by the fact that when my brothers started secondary, the council had an Assisted Places scheme to independant schools, and they got places, but this stopped by the time me and my sister started, so we went to comprehensives.

My accent used to drive her spare. She was forever correcting me and at one point sent me to elocution lessons. She may as well have flushed the money down the loo. The more it annoyed her, the broader Cockney I spoke. It was like my act of rebellion.

While my accent is now still clearly London, to the point I get my leg pulled at work (and I'm still in London!)I can talk ''proper'' in interviews and on the phone, so slip in and out of it.

I work as a mental health nurse and spend my day assessing service users. I think tbh my accent puts them at ease in that I don't think I'm seen as one of ''them'' (ie more officaldom-many have already had difficulties with housing, DWP etc).

I don't think my accent's heldme back tomuch but that maybe because as mentioned I do have the necessary skills to talk 'nicely' when I put my mind to it.

Anyway for now....
'GERROUT OF MY PUB!

yarp the whole thing is a nonsense and is misused by everyone from Cameron to Griffin.

I do object to people using Working Class as an indicator of coarseness and stupidity though.

For those who are commenting on my written English, I am sure that I have certainly made a few grammatical mistakes whilst typing on here. Without the chance to edit and the joys of autocorrect/stream of consciousness typing it can happen sometimes.

I wasn't referring to your typos. I don't think you write elegantly, so I doubt that you speak elegantly. For this reason, I think your sense of superiority is misplaced.

I really don't mean to be rude, I just think you're sorely lacking in perspective about ta etc.

You come across as frightfully dull OP ☹️

We all make mistakes op. Yours however, are consistent.