Teaching The Earliest Communicators

My two "Early Communicators"

Other than, "When should my child be making this sound?", the most asked questions about my job are how to get the youngest children speaking more (birth to age 3). First, I have two kiddos of my own in this age range. Second, I love working with little ones and really discovering how children communicate and watching them grow. So, I am really passionate about this subject.

Today's post will be some basic information that all parents of small children can incorporate into their daily routines to promote language development. These are general strategies; that is, an SLP can help you to incorporate more routines specific to your child. If you feel that your child is not meeting language milestones, please contact your local early intervention institution (a free government-mandated program). We can also evaluate your child here in our office or help you to find other services.

First and foremost, I cannot emphasize the importance of reading enough. You really can start as soon as your baby is born, reading a story dramatically and allowing yourself to play with your voice so your baby is exposed to many kinds of sounds. I understand that many older babies just will not sit for books. What I suggest is that you choose short board books and have your baby sit on your lap. You can point to pictures and just name items instead of reading the words. Choose a time when your baby is calm and is more willing to sit on your lap, whether that is as soon as they wake up in the morning, after breakfast, before nap or bedtime, etc.

For toddlers, just reading books on the subject matter they enjoy is great. Try to read to your child every day, even if they want the same book every day for months. Children this age actually crave and enjoy routine. You can talk about different things in the book, such as what the characters are doing, how they feel, what's in the background, what you think may happen next, what their favorite part is, etc.

Second, it is important to try and figure out how our child communicates. Children communicate from the moment they are born. If you pay attention closely enough, you can even begin to discriminate their cries and what they are trying to convey (example: a "pain cry" may sound different than a "hungry cry"). What is important to remember is that even before children can speak words (or instead of words for older children), they still communicate through behaviors. Crying, pointing, gesturing, noises, and even the dreaded tantrum are all ways that children communicate wants, needs, or feelings. It is important to figure out how your child is communicating because you need to know what to expect in terms of their ability to communicate.

• If your child does not communicate much at all, you can treat random noises or gestures as initiations of communication and pair that with a word and gesture yourself. For example, if your child says "uh" at meal time, you can say, "Oh, more!", pairing it with the sign for "more." 
• If your child points or gestures to communicate, you cannot expect words. I have heard of many caretakers withholding items until the child verbally asks for the item. This is a technique that we often suggest, however, for children that already say words. If a child is not yet at the verbal-word communication level, be sure to know to expect a gesture for requesting and pair the word with the request. Again, to use the food example, if a child points at the food, you can give the child their food and say, "more". 
• If your child does say words, feel free to manipulate the environment so that they must initiate communication. If it's dinner time, give your child one food and have their favorite within site but out of reach. Make them request the item and then add another word. Again, using the food example, if your child requests, "bread", you can hand them the bread and repeat the phrase back with one more word added, such as "more bread." This technique is called "scaffolding." Think of this technique like real scaffolding in construction. If your child puts up the first layer of scaffolding, they only can reach so high. You help to raise their language potential, and build more layers of your scaffold, by modeling a similar but slightly more complex phrase. 

Third, physical proximity is super important in language development with your child. In our blog post, "How Much Is Too Much Screen Time?", we talked about consuming screen time with your children to be able to talk about what they saw and how it relates to their real environment. This is important even in real-life play. Do not be afraid to get on the ground with your child. Try to establish eye contact when talking with them. Allowing back-and-forth communication allows your child to practice initiating language while also having you model slightly more complex language. 

This also lends to talking about following your child's lead. The most successful way of getting your child to increase language is to use what they are interested in. So, if you are on the floor with your child and they are playing with a ball, don't say, "Hey, come play with these cars with me!" Go play with the ball instead. Let your child take the lead on what they are interested in. 

Lastly, some other general rules for building language with kiddos. If you have been reading my blog, you may have noticed that I just love lists. That is how I shall end this blog:

• Imitate your child. I do this all day long with my 16 month old. If he says, "Ba!", I may say, "Ball!" and get the ball for him. This lets him know that I am listening to him, I understand him, and his communication attempt is working. If, however, he means bottle, he then knows that his communication attempt was not successful. He may get upset and repeat, "Ba!" I then know that I did not get my first guess right. What I am then able to do is say, "Oh, bottle" very slowly, giving him a model to what the word actually sounds like. The next time this interaction happens, he may differentiate his communication by saying something more close to bottle, such as buh-buh. Imitating your older child also allows you to correct grammar without saying that they are wrong or forcing them to repeat after you. For example, my 3 year old has trouble with irregular past tense verbs. Just this morning she said, "My daddy cutted the watermelon!" and I heard her preschool teacher say, "Oh, he cut the watermelon?" It made my heart happy because she was repeating back what she said, using the correct grammar, making her feel heard and understood, all while not pointing out that she made a mistake. 
• Label. Label everything. Talk about everything. Pretend your life is a podcast and you are the host, trying to get your audience to really understand what your studio is all about (the audience being your child). Match your child's language. If they are at the single word level, label things by single words. "Ooooo, car!" 
• Listen as much as you speak. Actually, listen twice as much. Three times as much, even! Give your child time to respond, time to initiate, space to explore and make mistakes with language. I always tell parents to give a child about 10 seconds to respond to something you say before repeating it, even counting in your head. 
• Give a hint before answering a question for a child. A friend once asked my daughter what was on her shirt. Assuming she didn't know, he answered his own question for her. I, of course, had to explain how to prompt kids to answer questions on their own. In this example, let's pretend that there was a dinosaur on her shirt. If she did not answer the question right away, I might give a hint or description, such as, "It's really big and lived long ago", or, "Whose bones did we see at the museum last week?". This not only encourages the child to answer questions, but it also created more pathways in the brain for the child to recall the word faster next time by giving descriptions to vocabulary. 
• Sing songs. Music is stored on the right side of our brain and language is stored on the left. Music and nursery rhymes allow both sides of our brain to work in unison and build more connections for language development. 
• Move your body. Just like with music, using full body movements, such as yoga, running, other play, etc., allows for more neural connections in the brain for language as well as giving an opportunity to label verbs, or action words. Many children use a lot of nouns, or objects, in their language but are slower to learn action words. 

Do you use any of these techniques? What have you found to be the most useful to you as a parent?

As always, if you have any concerns about your child's language development, please give us a call at the office at 412-761-6062 for a free screening or to schedule an evaluation (most insurances accepted, including medical assistance). If you don't even know what normal development is for your child's age, I really suggest these handouts from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and Read Aloud 15 MINUTES that explain speech and language milestones for children from ages birth to 5.

Also, this week I will be demonstrating most of these techniques on our Instagram stories under "Early Language." Be sure to look there for some videos explaining these techniques with my 16 month old. Our handle is rehabspecialists_slp. 

Until next time!

Kathleen