Silence for Infants!

The placement I was at for my clinical hours with infants kind of disturbed me. For the majority of the time that I spent there, I found that the adults did very little to no verbal interacting with the infants. There were a total of five adults in the room besides me with only 6-8 infants to care for on a daily basis. The only conversations that were had were mainly geared towards the adults and their day-to-day lives. Basically, they talked to each other but rarely to the infants. Some of the more calm infants were left in bouncy-chairs for the majority of the day because they were so quiet and easy to care for. The less tolerant infants seemed to be the ones that got most of the attention, because they were crying for it. It really bothered me that there wasn't even music playing in the background to provide for some auditory/sensory/language development. These babies are left in this day care setting for up to ten hours per day and they are barely getting exposed to language. Again, I was only a guest, so I did what I could to talk to the babies while I was in their presence. But if it were my own classroom, I would be doing things a lot differently.

Here is a site about the importance of communicating with infants and why it helps to develop language:
http://www.talkingpage.org/artic002.html