If a toddler screams “Give!” or “Give me!”, most adults won’t blink an eye. But if a four-year-old does it, we wince and wait for the parents to chide the child.

“Please. Mark. Say ‘Can you please give me the car?'”

Why?

Between the ages of 36 to 42 months, most typically developing kids start to replace direct requests (like “Give me!”) with indirect requests (like “Can I have..?” or “Would you please…?”).

No one knows for sure why we do this – it’s certainly not the most efficient way to ask for things.  But so-called “indirect speech” has been studied by linguists, philosophers and speech pathologists for decades (e.g. Grice, 1975; Lakoff, 1973).

In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers like Brown and Levinson and Clark developed a “theory of politeness” to explain indirect requests. In simple terms, they argued that a speaker’s request for attention or a favour is a ‘social threat’ to the listener’s reputation and authority, which the speaker therefore “softens” with politeness.

Speakers can soften requests to protect listeners from feeling threatened or challenged in several ways:

• Blunt, but polite: “Please help me.”
• Positively polite: “Could you please help me?”
• Negatively polite: “I’m really sorry to bother you, and I wouldn’t usually ask, but do you think it would be possible to help me with this?”
• Fairly indirect: “You are so good at this. I wish someone could have told me that doing it the way you do would help me.”
• Very indirect: “Oh I can’t believe it. I’m probably never going to figure this out.”

In each case, the speaker is asking the listener to help out with a task. How directly (or indirectly) we ask a listener to help us seems to depend on lots of factors including the size and inconvenience of the favour, the power balance between the listener and speaker, the urgency of the request, and the relationship between the listener and speaker (e.g. you are more likely to use direct requests to ask your sister for a small favour than to ask your boss a big favour).*

Why does this all matter?

Some kids – including some children with developmental language disorders or social language difficulties – don’t know how to ask for things indirectly. They demand things directly or simply snatch at what they want.

Adult strangers, teachers and even parents are hard-wired to interpret direct requests from 4-year-olds and older kids as rude or insolent: as an affront to good manners. Needless to say, this can lead to these kids being labelled as naughty and immature. Inappropriate direct requests from a 4+ year-old  (e.g. “Give me ice-cream!”) can also be embarrassing for families and loved ones who have to endure the judgment of adult strangers in public places.

When and how to help your child

Most kids pick up indirect request-making skills by around 3 1/2 years of age by watching others. But some kids (especially kids with communication difficulties) need some help.

If you are concerned about your child’s ability to ask for things appropriately, give your local speech pathologist a call! For parents and others working with these kids, we have published a simple DIY resource, designed to give kids lots of structured practice at making “Can I?” requests.  You can check it out at our sister site, Speechies in Business, here.

Related articles:

• Does my child have a language disorder? 6 questions speech pathologists should ask before assessment
• More verb-charged books to ignite your child’s language development
• “Can I?”  questions pack
• Speaking for themselves: why I choose ambitious goals to help young children put words together

Main source: Lee, J. & Pinker, S. (2010). Rationales for Indirect Speech: The Theory of the Strategic Speaker. Psychological Review, 117(3), 785-807.

* In recent years, Steven Pinker and colleagues have put forward another theory – the theory of the “strategic speaker” – to explain why adults use indirect “off-the-record” speech not to be polite, but to manage situations where it would be inappropriate or risky to speak directly, e.g. when blackmailing or threatening an employee, seeking donations, flirting with someone you shouldn’t be flirting with, bribing a waiter to jump the queue,  or sweet-talking a police officer into tearing up a speeding ticket.

I know I’m biased, but these quirks of human communication are interesting stuff!

Image: https://tinyurl.com/y7n39pfy