Talk to me
Some parents get very competitive about speech. They’ll boast about the range of vocabulary and the complicated sentences that their child has mastered. Clearly another Einstein has been born. Having two young sons along with nieces and nephews of varying verbosity, what makes me chortle is that however vocally advanced a child is at two, by the time they hit ten, they’re all pretty much the same.
My nephew had very little to say before he started school. Various people made comments, worrying his mother (because if you’re a mother, worried is your default state of being). Weeks into school, he was staggering teachers with his astounding reading ability. At the age of five he already has a reading age of eight. Which underlines very clearly what we all know. Every child develops at his or her own pace.
When you think about it, the learning curve of the average baby into toddlerhood is quite amazing
Communication kicks in from day one, as any mum (or dad) will know, when your baby tells you purely with the pitch of his strangled wail, that he’s got a bad case of wind.
By the time he’s saying Dada, you’ve already developed a sophisticated communication system of facial expressions, pitch of scream, wail or gurgle, hand signals and body movements. Indeed, some experts suggest that infants who take longer to talk aren’t suffering because their parents don’t encourage them to chatter, they simply have a better than average understanding of all the non-verbal stuff.
After all, if you intuit your child’s every need, what’s the point in him laying on a three-minute audio presentation for you?
‘We’re living in a very hectic world and it’s easy to forget to give children choices,’ explains Emma Rosenberg, a senior speech therapist working with paediatrics in Southampton. ‘If toddlers aren’t naturally chatty and you don’t ask what they’d like to wear or just pour out the squash, they don’t have to say anything.’
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