Who can fail to be charmed by the cute mispronunciations of a small child who asks for more "skabetti" or "pasketti" at dinner?
One of my friends posted on Facebook that her kindergartener was pronouncing the word "popular" as "pop-lee-are." I remembered both my boys doing the same thing. Soon, a bunch of moms were jumping in to share some of the cute ways their kids said things.
But then someone rained on our parade, suggesting that we "make a game of practicing the right way to say it. Phonemic awareness is one of the building blocks to reading."
Well, yeah. But that takes all the fun out of it. I don't usually stir things up on Facebook, but I had to say something. So I kept it light: "Aww, they grow up soon enough. I promise that my 19-year-old abandoned his adorable pronunciations at an appropriate time. But I always mourn the first time my kids pronounce something the real way after I've gotten used to those endearing mistakes."
Fortunately, that same mom "liked" my statement, so an argument didn't happen. But it's true. I was always sad when my kids learned to say "noodle" instead of "woodle" and that caterpillars don't hide themselves in "raccoons" before becoming butterflies. And my youngest no longer asks me to read him one more "bed night story." He can read all by himself now, and he reads plenty, despite all those little-kid mispronunciations he was famous for.
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