I think this happened when Sahil was about 5 years old, when he was expanding his vocabulary rapidly - and he was pronouncing some words incorrectly.
So Dileepa and I used to correct his pronunciation; we were (or so we thought) gentle, friendly, etc.
And then one day Sahil said “When you correct how I say things, it makes it harder for me to learn how to say it correctly.”
This was somewhat difficult for us to digest - how would he learn that he wasn’t pronounce a word correctly if he wasn’t corrected, and who better to take on that responsibility than the people who he interacts with the most (and hear his incorrect pronunciations regularly)?
But we decided we should honour his wishes, and we stopped imposing corrections.
What do you think was going on here? Why was it the corrections making it harder for him?
This is my hypothesis - when Sahil was getting corrected often, it created pressure to pronounce words correctly; even if he perhaps wasn’t familiar with the word, because he knew he would get “feedback” if he didn’t. And this pressure was making it uncomfortable for him to experiment with words, which is what he needed to learn how to use it.
Also, he didn’t actually need explicit correction (someone pointing out that his pronunciation was wrong) to learn how to pronounce it correctly - he would experience the word naturally (either he would hear us use it, or maybe he would encounter it on some video) and could self-correct based on that