Why I Teach My Kids Real Words
On Speech Delays and Big Little Vocabularies
Here’s how speech develops in kids. According to the Mayo Clinic, babies go from cooing, to gurgling, to babbling, and from there move on to imitating speech sounds, and finally to trying out words, little by little. And of course, there are other important milestones that go hand-in-hand with the actual speech: smiling at parents, for example. Recognizing familiar voices. Giving different cries for different needs. Understanding simple directions.
Here’s how speech developed in my kids.
My son’s first word, aside from the ubiquitous mama, was “ball.” He started saying it right around the one-year mark. When it came out, I almost couldn’t believe it. But yes, that was it, clearly. We were playing with some balls on the floor of his bedroom, and out it came — “Ba!”
A few months later, “ring” came along. And then…
Well, and then things kind of stopped. He gathered a few more words here and there, but by his eighteen-month appointment, he barely had ten words, and wasn’t imitating our speech at all. Since we were already keeping an eye on his development after a rough beginning to his life, the pediatrician got us a referral, and a few months later we were able to get him started with a wonderful Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) named, coincidentally, Emily. Emily told us that he was expected to have 200–300 words by the time he turned two. I was certain that this was an impossibility.
Emily was miraculous. She got right to work on his joint attention issue. She used some magical iPad app that had him imitating sounds within weeks, and then moved him up to word flash cards and objects. By the time Halloween rolled around, he was gaining a couple words per day. Shortly after, he suddenly revealed to us that he knew all of his colors, spot-on, even though that’s not something the CDC even counts on its milestone checklists until age 4. When he turned two, in January, he had exceeded the word quota, and was beginning to put two-word phrases together. The little dude was talking, unbelievably enough.
And then we had my daughter. She was born at the tail end of her brother’s incredible speech explosion, just three weeks before he turned two. Her birth was less rocky, and she came home with us immediately, instead of having to spend the first three weeks of her life hooked up to oxygen in the NICU.
#2 was my do-over baby. I was determined to do everything right by her. And indeed: she slept incredibly, she started rolling at 6 weeks, and happily, she started babbling and pointing and waving right exactly on time. And then…
Well, and then she just sort of stalled out. By 12 months she had mama, of course, but she didn’t really have much of anything else. We waited and waited. It would seem like she had a word, and then she would stop using it. I talked at her. I asked her to repeat words after me. She didn’t. But her problem wasn’t the same as her brother’s had been, not exactly. She clearly had the receptive language down. She would do anything we asked her to. Joint attention was not an issue — she was as social as could be. But the words just wouldn’t come.
At 18 months, right smack dab in the middle of the pandemic, we got her speech referral. A few months later, she started at the same location #1 had gone to — but not with Emily, because Emily had, unfortunately, moved on. Still, all it had taken for her brother to get talking was the little, eensy weensy extra push of speech therapy. Surely she would explode similarly.
Except that she didn’t. By the time we moved across the country at the end of November, she was well on her way to being potty trained, but still couldn’t say much beyond “no, bye-bye!” when she didn’t want me to buckle her car seat. (The potty training, by the way, was not because I wanted some precociously-trained kid, but because it was easier for massively-pregnant me to deal with floor accidents than continually trying to put a diaper back on her.) It took a few months to get speech arranged once we got to our new location, and still she didn’t take off. We had her hearing checked. Everything was fine.
Finally, finally, something inside her clicked. I stopped tracking words once she surpassed 100, and now everything with a hint of flavor is “spicy” and I am routinely told to “go awaaaaay!” Her speech is still quite garbled, and it will be a hot second until her SLP Mr. B is ready to release her, but she’s talking, which is something she wasn’t doing just six months ago.
The point here is that speech is a tricky business in our family. It’s not always as easy as the milestone books would have you think, but eventually, unless there’s truly an underlying condition, it does come along.
The good news is that it’s not something I will ever take for granted now. Every opportunity I get to teach #1 a fantastic new word he’s never encountered before, I take, and gladly. The bread we eat after communion in church is not just bread, it’s antidoron. This week I taught him the concept of substitution, as in, I had to substitute two red rectangle Legos for the white square Lego he was missing in his tractor set. It might be funny to encounter a four-year-old who can’t stop talking about gangways, but it’s language, and once not so long ago, he didn’t even have that. Why would I dumb down a word to a simpler concept, when he’s perfectly capable of understanding and using the more advanced version?
Now, of course, there’s #3 to think about. At 5 months and change, she’s as chatty and screamy as can be — dare I say more chatty and screamy than her siblings? — and is at the cusp of babbling. I have high hopes for this little nugget, but at the same time, I’m trying to be realistic. Both her siblings have needed the extra kick in the pants that speech therapy provided. What makes me think she’ll be any different?
We’ve had similar struggles with gross motor development, and right now she appears to be taking her sweet time learning to roll onto her stomach. But I know from past experience that she will progress, whether or not she needs professional help to take her first steps, as her brother did. Though it doesn’t feel like it now, she won’t go to kindergarten crawling. Likewise, she won’t go to kindergarten scream-grumbling like she does now either. And if it takes a stint in speech therapy to get her to words, so be it.
In the meantime, I’ll keep teaching the big words to my kids.
