Watson, an American psychologist, said, "Give me a group of healthy babies without defects and put them in the special environment I designed. I can guarantee that I can train any one of them to be an expert in any field I choose-a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a business leader, or even a beggar or a thief, regardless of his talent, hobbies, tendencies and abilities, and regardless of the occupation and race of his ancestors. " What does this mean? What is Watson's "special environment"?

Many psychologists believe that the newborn baby is a "whiteboard". Families and society can freely paint and carve on this whiteboard according to their own ideas, and shape children into any kind of people that parents and society hope. There are many phenomena in reality that confirm this situation. For example, when a foreign child grows up in China, his behavior, language and even values will be similar to those of children in China.

Although Watson's theory has been confirmed in practice, he does exaggerate the role of acquired environment in shaping a person's character. In fact, children have a certain personality and temperament type since they were born. He is not a whiteboard that can be completely discredited. He has his own ability and temperament, which will limit his future development direction. Don't say what kind of person you are trained to be, even the attitude and way parents treat their babies is not entirely up to one parent.

All newborn babies have basically the same language learning ability, and all language experience is zero. What language a child speaks is of course determined by the environment in which he grew up, which is what we usually call context. In daily life, the more you are exposed to a language, the more opportunities you have to practice it. In this way, children can quickly master their mother tongue in the context of their mother tongue.

When a child is not fully proficient in his mother tongue, he (she) has the ability to speak any language well, while when he (she) is proficient in a certain language, his (her) ability to speak other languages will deteriorate accordingly, which will happen within a few years after birth. This also explains why it becomes very difficult to learn another language after a certain age.

The lack of corresponding context and the deterioration of foreign language learning ability are the reasons why it is difficult to learn a foreign language when you are old. But does this mean that we should let our children learn many foreign languages from an early age? Actually, it's not. If children are exposed to multiple languages at once when their mother tongue is not fully proficient in automation, it is likely to cause confusion in their language system, and even may not be able to speak their mother tongue well in the end.