Talking to children with ‘baby talk’ is weird. It should be normal to talk to them like regular people.

By baby talk I mean the cutesy high-pitched voice with short sentences, vocal noises between speech, nonsense words, and lots of repetition.

That kind of speech seems to be an attempt to elicit engagement out of a child such as laughing or smiling. However, I fail to see how a child can gain substantive communication abilities from simplified speech outside of repetition. It is tantamount to shoving an iPad in front of a child instead of activities that encourage learning and engage social skills.

Talking to children using clear language structure and compound sentences should be encouraged and normalized over baby talk. It may mean they don’t seem as engaged, but the point of talking to children should be to get them to understand semantic meaning and form interlinking ideas.