Teaching our children to speak...and avoid the speech pathologist!

On my daughters last visit to the pediatrician, he was impressed with the size of her vocabulary and that she was already talking in sentences. This was normal for me, as my son had an equally large vocabulary at the same age. The doctor commented that he is seeing an increasing number of children requiring a referral to a speech pathologist. So why is this so?

Now, I'm not a speech pathologist, just a parent who had two children considered early talkers. I never set out to have early talkers, I just wanted to help my children communicate their needs. So, I'm not an expert, but here is what I did.

Firstly, when pregnant with my first child, baby signing was recommended to me as a way of teaching children to communicate to avoid them having tantrums when they can't express what they want. My husband and I bought a book and read about it. We did read that children who do baby signing usually end up being early talkers, but that still wasn't our inspiration. When our son was born, we started doing baby signing from day one. For those of you not familiar with baby signing, you do "signs" for a few basic words (eg; milk, change nappy, drink, hot, dog) and use these whenever you are talking to your child. You don't actually teach the words as a lesson, just use them in context. For example, the action for milk is the same as milking a cow, so when you ask them if they would like some milk, you do the action at the same time you say the word.

Eventually they start to do the signs, and quickly learn the word that goes with them. Once they learn to say the word, they drop the signing as it's no longer required. They then want to learn more words and signs to give more meaning to their communication. They go from wanting to tell you they can see a dog while out walking to wanting to tell you it's a big dog and they want to pat it.

Both of our children did their first sign at 7 months. I can't tell you how much of a relief it is that a child can sign "milk" when they aren't well and grizzly and you are trying to work out what to do to stop them crying! I remember one night getting up to my son in the middle of the night to him signing "hot" and "milk". I took his temperature and he had a fever. I gave him some panadol and a breast feed and he settled back down quickly. I wonder how long it would have taken me to work out what was wrong if he couldn't sign, as he couldn't yet say those words?

Secondly, as my son was approaching toddlerhood, I read a book about Neuro-Linguistic Programming as a method of avoiding the terrible twos. I didn't know at the time, but was told later by a speech pathologist that I met, that one of the activities I did from the book contributed to him learning to speak. The book advised that each time an instruction is given, keep the wording brief, as otherwise all the child will here is blah, blah, blah instead of the important words. So "Your nappy's wet, let's go and change your nappy'" becomes simply "Change nappy." (I would also do the baby sign for change nappy).

A game you can play with your child is put three objects in front of them, for this example I'll use farm toys. Pick each item up and simply say its name. Then pick each item up one at a time and say "Mum pick up cow" then using the child's name say "(name) pick up cow". Once they pick it up, give them positive feedback (yay, clap hands). This activity was in the NLP book and also mentioned by the speech pathologist.

I found that once they learn to talk, other concepts start to fall into place. My daughter is 20 months and can name colours and is learning to count. My son was the same and consequently learnt maths very early on (and now is a little obsessed with numbers). With my son I was constantly stopped in the supermarkets and asked why he wasn't at school, and usually the person asking was surprised when I said he wasn't old enough. I can expect the same for my daughter as she gets a little older as she talks just as much.

The other day my husband took the kids for a walk. When they returned my daughter said "Walk dad, I see pussycat, I see dog walking with lady."

The upside to having children who are early talkers are that they find it easy to communicate. The down side is that once they start talking....they don't stop!