Children repeating bad grammar they hear at nursery

[caughtinthesnow]

My little one is 2 and a half and I've noticed she repeats some grammatical errors. She definitely hasn't heard them from us..

The main one I've noticed is ' was ' instead of ' were '.

I know it hasn't come from us, because that's how the nursery teachers speak and write too...

It's not ideal is it? Has anyone had this issue with nursery or school ? I would expect a school teacher not to make grammatical mistakes like confusing was with were, but I don't know. I wouldn't have expected nursery teachers to make that kind of mistake.

Why though?

Do you still feel like that having learnt it’s the standard form elsewhere, eg in Ireland?

Just because you don't say it doesn't mean you know where it's come from. Your examples are over extensions. Children typically do this as they learn some rules, but don't know others, or the contexts in which they apply.

😂😂😂How middle class is mumsnet these days? For god sake - find a real problem to worry about instead of this nonsense. At two and a half he has many years to perfect his grammar - get over yourself! 🤣🤣🤣

' .... drived me insane ...' eh???

y don’t u put the child with a childminder than u can actually find out who is looking after yr child rather than a 16 year old apprentice who is at the nursery as that was all they were offered.

It's that age where they take things in from a variety of sources and sometimes all sorts of thing creep in. When our DC was a little older than yours nursery asked if he was tired and - after having watched Wallace and Gromit over Christmas - he replied that he was 'cream crackered'. So excellent understanding of the prog, but no knowledge this wasn't a very common phase to use aged 3ish

Have you thought about re-writing that suggestion, using the correct grammar? Honestly, you're part of the problem.

If you let others play the major part in your child’s upbringing you can’t complain that they reflect their attributes.

‘Let’? Most people need to work.
Mine only went to nursery 15 hours a week so I’m pretty sure I was still playing the ‘major part in my child’s upbringing’, and she still came home saying ‘hospickle’ and ‘bockle’ because her key worker did.

Oh my god, no it's not.

God our kids (we as in our group of nursery kids who I knew) all had this terrible ‘nursery accent’ which was picked up from some strong accents belonging to staff. We just used to laugh it off. Kids are all at uni now, and us nursery mums meet up a few times a year and we were only laughing about the nursery accent before christmas. Thankfully it was long gone once they started school.

This is a really rude way to refer to someone's accent, and I doubt you would appreciate it if someone spoke that way about your accent. Those staff members were good enough to look after your children.

People make fun of my accent all the time as I am not local. It was a strong accent that didn’t reflect where the kids lived, it wasn’t an accent we all particularly wanted no. Like people might not want their kids having an accent like mine. I am not precious if people don’t like my accent, I mean I would rather have a local posher accent too, but I don’t

Not being "precious" when people don't like your accent is your choice and not really comparable with getting together with your mates and sniggering, presumably behind their backs, at the accents of the poorly paid and overworked staff taking care of your children.

The level of ignorance in some of the comments on this thread is mind blowing but yours is a whole new level. Congratulations!

Thanks!

Oh my god, this! I bloody hate this. ‘I was SAT there’ is not a regional quirk or evolving language, it’s just wrong English. I haven’t come across this many grammatical errors in the tiny Asian country I grew up in, where English was taught as a second language!

I think everyone has different accents in the UK so what seems right in one place is wrong in another. My friends child has a very broad northern accent from her friends and teachers even though her parents didn't grow up in the North.

Children pick up what they are exposed to the most. Make sure that if you are precious about it they are spending most of their time with you!

The OP isn’t talking about accents though, she’s talking about grammar.

Be grateful it's grammar. My DS aged 3 came home swearing like a trooper last term. Definitely not words we have ever said in our household. I was very shocked to which child it was when I heard the same child encouraging my son to say them at drop off....

I'd have loved to have been able to just focus on was and were with him rather than spending the Christmas holidays trying to stamp out him saying effing this and effing that.

I was sat/stood is very common in the north east. Also ’tret’ instead of treated.

'I was sat/stood' can often convey a useful nuance of meaning - to do with embarrassment, inconvenience, things not happening the way they should. 'I was sat/stood there [like a lemon] waiting for the office to open but nobody was there'. You'd never say 'I was sitting/standing there like a lemon'.

You'd never say 'I was sitting/standing there like a lemon'.

Where I live ‘I was stood’ or ‘I was sat’ are never used instead of ‘I was standing/sitting’ and people do say things like ‘I was standing there like a complete fool’ quite regularly.

Do people who typically use I was stood/sat also use I was standing/sitting to describe different types of situations so @TheLittleOldWomanWhoShrinks?
I didn’t actually realise that.

'I was stood' etc. no way down south or east Anglia where I live. Many crimes against grammar but not that one

My thoughts exactly when I read this thread! I have friends that had to move their kids to different nurseries because they were picking up cuss words.
How can anyone find the time to care about bad grammar? Toddlers speak imperfectly anyway it's not necessarily even the fault of someone else at the nursery maybe your child just hasn't learnt how to say certain phrases yet! Just keep correcting them and they'll speak fine by the time they're in primary school. By year 2 your child saying "I was sat there" will be a distant memory.

It reminds me of when our first child is one year old and everyone's getting mad about bully one year olds pushing other one year olds as if they even know what they're doing (don't tell me all parents haven't gone through this stage)

Joseph Priestley in his Rudiments of Grammar (1762) was relaxed about 'you was'. In the last days of Margaret Thatcher's premiership a Conservative MP quoted a member of their local party, a Devon farmer, as saying 'she'm got to go'. I think there may be some randomness about which manifestation of a verb goes with which pronoun. You can listen to what many people say then draw a line, called an isogloss, on the map to show where one form of speech ends and another begins. I would not want to call any form of speech in habitual use ungrammatical. And some people have in effect two grammars depending on the context in which they are speaking; they may have demotic speech but they are aware of what is regarded as formally correct.