Dear Prudence,
My wife reads to our son in a dramatically overaccentuated baby voice. I use unusual voices when I read to him too, but they’re a little different than the usual ones you might hear from parents reading to their kids. I don’t know if I’m being snobby, or if I’m just judging her for a lack of creativity in the face of such a fun opportunity for invention. Maybe I want him to grow up with a more sophisticated ability to parse language. She’s a writer and I know she’s going to set a pretty high bar for the caliber of kids books he encounters based on her own discerning tastes, and I know she’ll curate other aspects of his developmental life. But I’m a podcast, audiobook, and music guy so I have a broad spectrum to my auditory palette. Should I chill the hell out or encourage her to relate these stories in a less cutesy way?