For me, becoming a mother was an experience as disorienting and confusing as moving to a new country. I had to learn new behaviours and customs as well as which brands of nappy and baby food to buy. And little did I know that moving to the Netherlands after the birth of my first child would entail having to learn a whole new tongue besides Dutch.
Which one?
I’m not talking about motherese, the high-pitched singsong ways parents speak to their children, but about the highly specific language mothers and fathers around the world now use to talk about being parents.
Eh?
Unsure of myself, I started reading parenting books and spent a lot of time on online forums, where I tried to find answers to my questions – or, when there weren’t any, then at least some support or understanding.
Not the place I'd choose to go to for that, but you do you, eh?
It was on BabyCenter that I first discovered this new parenting language. I often found myself resorting to Google to understand what people were saying. I had to familiarise myself with acronyms such as DS and DD (dear son and dear daughter), CS (caesarean section), EB (extended breastfeeding) and CIO (cry it out).
All groups evolve their own language, didn't you learn that on the internet?
It didn’t take me long to notice that even the things I read in Polish were translations of books by English-speaking authors such as Tracy Hogg’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, which I suffered through just to try to understand why my daughter would not stop crying. Spoiler alert: it did not help.
Well, since you're supposedly multilingual, what does it matter?
My copy of American parenting expert Heidi Murkoff’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting was in English – despite being translated into 50 languages, including Polish – and after a while so was everything else I was reading.
And why is that an issue? I cannot wrap my head around what this column is really about...
And, of course, books and articles about the way parents in Europe and other places raise their children are extremely popular in the US and the UK. However, from my experience, US and UK parenting ideas have a bigger sway in Europe than the other way around. What does it mean if the English language has such power to influence the way mothers and fathers raise their children around the world?
I don't know, and you don't advance a theory, so why is it concerning you?
