If you are worried about your 2 year old or 3 year old who is not talking yet, or is talking but not using sentences, check out the following suggestions. These are all in line with what experts know about speech development, and are the kind of things you will hear or do if you consult a speech therapist.
More importantly, these are not feel-good tips that will work only with children who are already going to pick up speech easily anyway. They have been specially collated by a speech therapist to address actual difficulties encountered by parents if your child is slow in picking up speech.
What you can do:
1. Help your child to develop his speech muscles.
In Get Your Toddler Talking you can find fun easy tips to get your toddler talking. One aspect of speech that parents may overlook is the physical aspect of speech: your child’s lips and tongue are speech muscles that need a workout too.
Your child needs to develop both the muscle strength as well as the co-ordination in order to move speech muscles and produce different sounds.
You can improve your child’s articulation of speech sounds using simple everyday objects you already have at home.
Using a mirror, for example, allows your child to see how his or her own mouth moves in order to form words. Use straws, bubbles or cotton wool to encourage blowing. Many speech sounds require blowing: s sound, f, ch, sh etc. Check out other ideas via Get Your Toddler Talking.
Tip: Don’t worry if your child can’t immediately imitate you and say sounds clearly while looking in the mirror. Try saying the words ‘silently’, just exaggerating how you move your mouth while ‘turning off the sound’.
Many children I work with in speech therapy find that it is actually easier to focus on the mouth movements this way, and can imitate the mouth movements more readily. Once your child can manage this ‘silent imitation’ you can try ‘turning the sound back on’!
2. Use rhymes and songs.
Harness the power of music. Many children may not show interest when you are talking and yet immediately turn and look when you play his favourite songs.
Here is a popular one “Wheels on the Bus” YouTube video:
In How to Sing with Toddlers the Hanen Way, speech therapists suggest you can encourage your child to participate in songs by pausing before the last word in each line and wait for your child to fill in the missing word (e.g. “Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you -”).
You can also encourage your child to perform actions in songs. You can proactively take his or hands and help him with the action – but do this in a gentle encouraging way of course.
Tip: If your child is just watching a video of a song, it is easy to just sit and watch without him participating. You can pause the video at key points, just before the last word in a line, or just before an action, and encourage your child to participate.
“What happens next?” “We stomp? Let’s see”.
With some practice you can do this in a natural way that adds fun and suspense. Don’t overdo it or make it tiresome!
3. Create a need to communicate.
Most parents already do this (partly out of desperation sometimes) but it may be limited to a few occasions of “You want milk, say milk.” and quite often if your child can’t say “Milk” or gives up, you may not know how to follow up and end up feeling he wins, I lose…
This list of 15 Communication Temptations for Early Language Development is great because it shows you examples of how you can:
– create a need to get your child to ‘talk to get you want’, and
– create a need to talk to ‘refuse what you don’t want’ e.g. pretend to offer a food that you know your child does not like. Often a child will be more motivated to refuse something than to work to get something.
In this video below, you can see for yourself Tempting Your Child to Communicate in action.
1. Create a need for your child to communicate by putting a desirable toy (car set) within sight, but out of reach (in a container your child can’t open).
2. WAIT for your child to Experience the need to communicate, see for himself that his need does not get satisfied if he doesn’t communicate, then
3. demonstrate (model) to your child how to communicate to satisfy the need. “Help please.”
There is one entire list of over 30 Other ways to add ‘waiting’ into everyday activities: which really uses everyday activities. No extra ‘speech time’ needed, no special toys – just your willingness to do something different to get a different outcome – a child that talks more.
Some examples are: Give your child food in a package he cannot open on his own, and wait. or Hand him just one shoe, then wait without offering the other shoe. (Yes, we would be waiting for the other shoe to drop.. excuse the pun..)
As you can see, there are a number of different aspects you can work on if your child is not talking, just to name a few here: working on the physical aspect of speech, harnessing the power of music, and intentionally increasing opportunities for your child to use speech.
Do you have more questions or tips about your toddler’s speech? Let us know in the comments section below!