Nina In New York: Does Your Baby Know Chinese Yet? Why, Don't You Love Her?

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

This week on my neighborhood parent message board, I and my fellow procreators were invited to please sign our babies up to learn Mandarin Chinese. The program is for those as young as three months, up through preschool age. It's a very popular and well-respected curriculum out of Manhattan that endeavors to teach your newborn infant how to speak a complex foreign language they likely do not hear at home. Your newborn infant, who cannot yet do any of the following things (to name a few): roll over, respond to his name, identify his own foot, locate his nose, correctly process most visual stimuli, digest food without regurgitating, deliberately grasp an object for longer than four seconds, make noises other than gurgling, cooing and wailing his head off.

Probably, the babies enrolled in baby Mandarin immersion are little genius babies who came out of the womb wearing a pair of spectacles and holding a copy of The Economist. Likely, they spend the sessions raptly absorbing the content of the class, and not crying or projectile vomiting or pooping or all three. They are already divested and diversified and they definitely don't wonder whether mulch = food. I know it could never have been for us, because when I brought my daughter to a plain, old, regular dumb-dumb baby music class at the tender age of four months, she cried bloody murder and immediately filled her diaper when the teacher dumped out a bag of maracas. Literally, she sh** her pants. I think we've hit our intensity ceiling. I know I have.

The world in which my daughter will come of age will be a complicated one, to be certain. Leaving aside all of the obvious concerns about safety and international relations, I anticipate the professional plane to be exponentially more competitive than it is for young people today. The playing field will be vastly elevated, the skill sets and advance degrees will be numerous and broad. Alternatively, college will become so expensive and expectations so high that everyone will abandon higher learning and enroll in correspondence courses. But let's stick with the first scenario. Like any concerned parent, I obviously want to give my kid every advantage and bit of education I can fling at her.

That being said, it makes me extraordinarily nervous to spend time around people whose kids are older than mine and who tell me stories about tests for four-year-olds that will determine their academic paths for the next fifteen years and who give me advice like, "oh, I had little Spirulina signed up for pre-K, K, post-K, pre-post-K and post-pre-post-K by the time she was three weeks old and even then I was #172 on the waiting lists." I don't like this. No, not one bit.

It's not that I have anything against raising high-achieving, bi- or tri- or tetra-lingual children. It's the wave of the future! I'm jealous of the generations to come who will be exposed to other cultures and languages from an early enough age to have a lasting impact. And if I'm to take anything away from the mind-bending, eyeball-searing hours of watching Dora the Explorer, it's that my child is not too young to learn a few words in another tongue. But I just can't do it. I can't see my way to language immersion class for a one-and-a-half-year-old. I was the most high-strung, type A, my-life-is-over-if-I-don't-get-into-an-Ivy kid, and that happened all on its own. God help me if I'd been expected to start singing in Portuguese at age two. I'd have been chain smoking by the fourth grade.

I'm not exactly an outlier in my reaction, which is a relief, but there are clearly many, many parents who are far less allergic to the hyper-precocious, super intense environment our babies have evidently inherited. Am I interested in signing up for a baby music class that teaches scales and focuses intensely on individual ability? Meh. Am I supposed to? Do I want to join a mommy and me group that promotes independent play while parents are asked to churn butter and knit? Well, maybe, but only for the cocktail party anecdote.

The moms and dads who are into this stuff are better than I. More motivated, better team players, more open-minded, way more foresight. Good for them and their highly-skilled kids. Their sons and daughters will probably beat my daughter out for that last spot in the Yale class of 2031 reserved for upper-middle-class white kids from the NYC area. And when that happens, she can rail against me for holding her back and stifling her potential because little Spatner and Camphor were fluent in six dialects of German before they were out of diapers and she was still prattling on about the "bitsy spider" in common playground English. I guess that'll be my shame to bear.

Duìbùqǐ, kiddo.

Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!