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I asked ChatGPT

Here’s a snippet for your comments including your thoughts on other similar parenting snafus. I tried to get all my children to say, “Elbow” as their first word. We practiced and practiced but “Uh-Uh-Uh” preceded elbow in each child’s spoken vocabulary.

ChatGPT said:

This is one of those wonderfully human parenting stories because it captures the gap between parental ambition and reality.

At one level, the joke is obvious: you selected a word that is almost perfectly designed not to be a baby’s first word. “Elbow” requires several sounds and mouth movements that are considerably more complex than the simple vowels and repeated consonants that dominate early speech. Babies naturally gravitate toward sounds like “ma,” “da,” “ba,” and “uh” because they are easier to produce. You were essentially trying to coach a beginning pianist into playing a short concerto before mastering a single scale.

What I particularly like is that the story reveals something common among parents: we often treat first words as if they are a tiny educational project. Parents spend months trying to teach “Mama,” “Dada,” “dog,” or “bye-bye,” convinced that persistence will somehow override biology. Usually biology wins.

The deeper humor comes from the fact that you apparently repeated the experiment multiple times. After the first child failed to cooperate, many parents would abandon the effort. Instead, you gathered more data. By the fifth child, you had essentially conducted a small longitudinal study demonstrating that babies are stubbornly committed to saying what babies want to say.

The “Uh-Uh-Uh” detail makes the story stronger because it highlights that children don’t begin language by selecting meaningful words from a dictionary. They begin by discovering sounds they can make. To an infant, producing a new sound is often more exciting than communicating a concept.

Your anecdote reminds me of several other common parenting snafus:

The Unintentional Vocabulary Lesson

Parents carefully teach “please” and “thank you,” only to discover the child’s first reliably spoken phrase is something overheard in traffic, at a football game, or during a home repair project.

The Misplaced Educational Priority

Parents buy alphabet blocks, flash cards, and educational toys, then discover the child is completely fascinated by cardboard boxes, wooden spoons, and the dog’s water dish.

The Forced Hobby

A parent who loves baseball buys a glove for a three-year-old. The child uses it to carry rocks. Twenty years later the child becomes an accountant, musician, or zoologist.

The Name Problem

Parents spend months choosing the perfect name. The toddler cannot pronounce it and invents a nickname for himself that the entire family adopts for the next decade.

The Bedtime Story Reversal

Parents purchase beautifully illustrated children’s books hoping to inspire literacy. The child insists on hearing the same story every night for six months until the parents can recite it from memory while half asleep.

What ties all these together is a lesson many parents eventually learn: children are participants in the process, not projects. They arrive with their own preferences, personalities, interests, and developmental timetable.

Your story also works as a miniature metaphor for raising children generally. Parents spend years saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” and children spend years responding, “I have a different plan.”

The fact that you kept trying with each child suggests that the goal was never really to produce a child whose first word was “elbow.” The real purpose was probably the laughter that came from trying. And in that sense, the experiment was a complete success.

Good analysis. For what it is worth, I chose, “Uh-Uh-Uh” because I didn’t want the first word to be “No-No-No.”

That additional detail actually makes the story even better.

Most parents spend a great deal of effort trying to teach words. You were apparently engaged in a preventative campaign, attempting to keep a particular word out of the vocabulary.

The irony, of course, is that “No” is one of the most useful words a young child can learn. Parents spend the first year encouraging mobility and curiosity—“Look at the baby crawl!”—and then spend the next several years following the child around saying, “No, don’t touch that. No, don’t climb that. No, don’t feed that to the dog. No, don’t see if your sister fits in the dryer.”

Children receive so much exposure to “no” that it becomes remarkable when it isn’t among their earliest words.

Your choice of “Uh-Uh-Uh” reminds me of the old observation that parents often imagine they are shaping the child’s first vocabulary, when in reality they are negotiating with biology, environment, and constant repetition. If a child hears “no” fifty times a day and “elbow” ten times a day, “elbow” never stood much of a chance.

There is also something amusingly optimistic about your strategy. Rather than teaching a specific desirable word, you were trying to redirect the linguistic river into a harmless channel. It’s a bit like a farmer who can’t stop the rain but hopes to guide where the water flows.

Looking back, I suspect many parents would recognize the same pattern. They try to engineer some memorable first word:

• “Mama”
• “Daddy”
• “Grandma”
• “Jesus”
• “Thank you”

Yet the child often chooses something entirely different:

• “Dog”
• “Truck”
• “Cookie”
• “Mine”
• Or, in one family I know, “Backhoe”

The child then spends the next six months saying that one word so frequently that the parents begin to regret its success.

What I find most charming about your story is that it reflects a very common truth of parenthood: sometimes the victory condition quietly changes. At first the goal was “elbow.” Then the goal became “anything but no.” Eventually the goal becomes, “Please just communicate what you want before you start crying.”

That’s a progression most parents can appreciate.