Parentese and speaking in the third person

Norman Rockwell (modified) — image in public domain

This is not the piece I was planning to write this week, but I changed my mind after a trip to the local pool where I swim a couple of times a week. Today, my departure happened to coincide with the start of infant swimming lessons, so the change room was full of crying babies and women trying to coerce their recalcitrant toddlers into swimming gear.

Just as I was leaving, I heard one woman say to her bawling infant, ‘Did you hurt your arm? Would you like mummy to kiss it better?’ Now, I’ve heard endless variants of this phrasing over the years and never given it a second thought. Indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that I may well have used it myself when speaking to my various nieces and nephews (as in ‘Would you like Auntie Kirsty to help tie your shoelaces?’).

But it suddenly struck me as tremendously odd that when conversing with toddlers, adults generally, and parents in particular, suddenly start to speak about themselves in the third person, like we’ve all morphed into the Dude in The Big Lebowski (as in, ‘I do mind. The Dude minds. This will not stand. This aggression will not stand!’). In response to ‘Would you like mummy to kiss it better?’, I half expected the child to scream, ‘Yes, go get her!’, because it’s the sort of phrasing we would generally use to speak about someone who is not in the room.

The technical name for this phenomenon is illeism. Interestingly, illeism is occasionally employed in some languages as a means of connoting politeness. For example, this is true of Korean, where people not uncommonly use their own or someone else’s name rather that employing the I/you pronouns, which themselves have various forms that are status and context-contingent.¹ As the anthropologists Jack Sidnell and Merav Shohet note of Vietnamese pronouns, which have similar characteristics, ‘use of names in self-reference and address allows the speaker to avoid formally characterizing the relationship between him- or herself and the recipient’.

However, in English, although illeism occasionally signifies humility (think Dobby in the Harry Potter series), it’s most commonly associated with bravado—especially of the type favoured by male athletes and politicians. The US politician and presidential contender Bob Dole was famous (and much spoofed) for the habit; so are LeBron James and Donald Trump.

Interestingly, Salvador Dali—a man who once said, ‘Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali’—spoke about himself so frequently in the third person that people around him also purportedly picked up the habit. This contagiousness is illustrated in an episode of Seinfeld, where George starts talking like Jimmy—a guy at the gym who constantly speaks about himself in the third person—to somewhat confusing effect.

Increasingly, it’s common to see claims that illeism is not, as popularly assumed, the exclusive province of grandstanders, but a psychologically healthy habit that we would all be advised to employ more.² These claims stem from various psychological studies (like this and this) suggesting that the ‘self-distancing’ illeism entails can help improve reasoning—including responses to stressful situations.

Some parenting websites have suggested that parental illeism may be related insofar as talking to relentlessly inquisitive (and frequently obstreperous) toddlers is often stressful. As Joshua Krisch observes, it may help parents collect their thoughts when their patience is being severely tested. In his words, ‘I speak to my children in the third person. “Daddy would love to read that same story for the fifth time,” I say. “But if daddy does that he will lose what’s left of his mind”.’³

Conversely, the most common explanation on Reddit, Mumsnet and Parenting Stack Exchange threads is that parents employ illeism as a means of helping their children understand pronouns, which toddlers typically struggle with when they are learning to speak. The problem with this view is that it’s questionable whether parental illeism helps children understand pronouns or merely confuses them further, especially given that many are simultaneously used with personal pronouns.⁴ ‘Would you like mummy to kiss it better?’ is a case in point. Consistency would require the parent to say ‘Would Mary like mummy to kiss it better?’

My other beef with this theory is its implication that the use of illeism is intentional on the part of parents. It seems more in the way of an unconscious habit that parents fall into, and then fall back out of when their kids reach a certain age. Indeed, parenting threads suggest that it can be a difficult linguistic quirk to rid oneself of. For instance, a Reddit thread titled ‘My (25) mom (57) refers to herself as mommy when talking in third person to me. What should I do?’ and a Mumsnet thread titled ‘Talking in the third person to teenage and almost-teenage children’ suggest that the habit occasionally persists well after the children have left toddlerhood.

Another possibility is that parents pick up the habit from their children themselves. As the linguist Arnold Zwicky observes, toddlers are notorious illeists—as in ‘Billy want cookie!’ and ‘Susie sit here?’ Thus, it’s entirely possible that parents are like George from Seinfeld, unconsciously influenced by their very own mini-Jimmy.⁵ Still, parental illeism sometimes starts before children have any vocabulary to speak of, such as when a woman croons ‘Mummy loves you’ to her baby.

In fact, it’s equally plausible that children learn the habit from their parents. Parents frequently like to blame Elmo for their toddlers’ tendency to use illeism—to the extent that the makers of Sesame Street have repeatedly had to explain that Elmo is merely mimicking the language patterns of three-year-olds, not responsible for them.⁶ However, Zwicky observes that while parents frequently fixate on their toddlers’ use of the third person, they often fail to recognise their own. In his words, ‘I have no idea how many parents [who] object to toddler illeism use kin-term illeism to their kids, but I suspect the number is considerable’.

Basically, this seems to be your classic chicken-egg situation, where it’s not entirely clear what comes first: toddlers’ illeism or that of their parents. Still, given that illeism seems to be universal amongst toddlers, this begs the question of whether kin-term parental illeism is also universal.

We do know that certain forms of ‘parentese’ are found the world over. A major recent study by anthropologists and psychologists took recordings of adult and infant-directed songs in 21 countries around the world, and then played them back to over 50,000 people from 187 countries, asking them to guess which ones were directed at infants. The researchers found that the majority of listeners, regardless of their cultural origin, could determine with about 70% accuracy which songs were directed at infants based purely on their acoustic features—basically, the sing-song, high-pitched quality we adopt when speaking to babies.⁷

Still, this doesn’t get us closer to understanding the prevalence of the parental third-person around the world. It’s clearly found in certain Asian languages, although this is potentially related to the tendency to avoid pronouns—especially given that kin-based illeism is widespread and often not restricted to childhood. Thus, a Korean father would think nothing of texting his adult son with ‘Call daddy’ as opposed to ‘call me’. Based on a Reddit thread on this topic, it also appears to be common in Brazil and Iceland, and a reader mentions hearing an isiXhosa speaker (one of the official languages of South Africa) use the third person when speaking to her adult son.

While it seems premature to conclude that parental illeism is universal, its frequency suggests that it’s probably a largely unconscious response to the speech patterns of toddlers, as well as an instinctive assertion of a unique kinship tie. Still, learned behaviour or instinct, it’s difficult to discount the power of parental illeism in managing unruly toddlers. Because sometimes a well-placed ‘mummy says so!’ is just what you need.

1. I’ve written elsewhere about the fact that the local children in the Seoul neighbourhood I lived in when I first did fieldwork there in the 1990s thought I was some sort of Simple Jack. I’m convinced that the culprit was my mistake in using the wrong form for ‘I’ (the humble jeo instead of the more appropriate na) when I first met a gang of curious local kids, thus treating them as my social superiors. In Seoul in the 1990s, foreigners were an extremely rare sight outside of downtown Seoul, so I doubt most of the neighbourhood children had interacted with a westerner before. Their name for me (actually, everyone’s name for me) was ‘the American’ (Miguk saram), which was basically synonymous at the time with ‘white person’.

2. I’m not remotely convinced of this, but have little objection to its widespread use, given that, as Ellen DeGeneres observes, illeism would resolve numerous awkward social interactions for those of us who are bad at remembering names.

3. Indeed, watching footage of Elmo being repeatedly forced to defer to his friend Zoe’s pet rock, one gets the impression that illeism is the only thing keeping Elmo from picking ‘Rocco’ up and bludgeoning Zoe over the head with it—although it’s clearly a close call.

4. What makes it even more unlikely as an intentional pedagogical strategy is that parents typically police their children’s language to ensure it’s grammatically and socially correct, which explains all the concerned threads on children’s illeism. For instance, my South Australian mother, worried that we would develop uncouth Queensland accents, was constantly correcting our speech when we were little. ‘It’s Tues-day, not Tues-dee’, she would admonish us when we fell into such Queenslandisms. (You would have to be Australian to understand the significance of this, but South Australians are widely acknowledged to have the poshest accents and Queenslanders the most ocker, so she was particularly horrified by the idea of us acquiring them.)

5. And not just because toddlers universally struggle with pronouns, but because ego and bravado are attributes they have in abundance.

6. Poor Elmo has also been blamed for rising levels of self-obsession amongst children, based on an apparent conflation of the illeism of toddlers and politicians. ‘Elmo has been learning the same lesson his whole life, which is that Elmo likes Elmo’, railed one critic.

7. It’s my firm belief that three types of talk are best conducted in private, because they are simply too excruciating for external ears to bear: talk to babies, talk to pets and talk to lovers.