Non babbling / non verbal 2 year old?!

[Klippin]

My little boy is 2 years 4 months and is non-verbal. He has very little babbling and has never really gone through the typical “bababa/dadada/mamama” stage.

His understanding is good and he communicates really well non-verbally — pointing, signing, gestures, good eye contact and joint attention. He’s very social and engaged with us, but producing speech sounds seems incredibly difficult for him.
I’d really love to hear from parents whose child was similar at this age, particularly children who had little or no babbling as well as no words.

Did your child eventually start talking? If so, at what age, and did you ever find out what was causing the difficulty?

Positive stories especially welcome ❤️

My DS was late learning to talk (he didn't have any words at age 2) and is now doing really well at school and got excellent GCSE results last term.

He was babbling though.

Is your son going to speech therapy? Can you afford to go private if there are long waiting lists for the NHS?

We had very little at this age, I took him along to drop in SALT (speech and language therapy)clinic. Because his comprehension was excellent, just few words. Get his hearing checked and then get on the road to speech therapy they probably won’t start before he’s 3. DS is absolutely fine now (16) and you’d never know.
Oh just reread and saw you wanted to know why, we had a diagnosed speech delay and then a speech sound disorder, so his brain wasn’t processing sounds correctly. All came good by about 7.

My eldest son was a late talker and I thoroughly recommend getting in the system now for speech therapy. He was non verbal at and was about two and half for his first words.

we had a great speech therapist which we started using age three. My son had a lot of difficulties forming sounds but the key advice we were giving is practice and to model language. I still hear myself doing this. Do you want a sandwich: then I would say ‘yes or no mummy’ so show him what I expected him to say.

on off his therapists described learning to speak like a foreign language.

he is 8 now and has great speech!

I say getting in the system as there are waiting lists for SALT

Are you due for a check up with the health visitors? They can refer to speech and language.

My DS was speech delayed, hardly made a sound and had just six words by 2 and a half. He received support via speech and language, learning makaton and we were taught how to encourage communication. His language exploded just before his third birthday, it was almost like the flood gates opened once he worked out how to speak. He is now in his third year at uni and has excellent vocabulary. In his teens he was diagnosed autistic (what was then called Asperger’s) and they really heavily focused on his speech delay as an early sign. But, he was also delayed in other things that your child doesn’t seem to be eg he would not point, couldn’t manipulate his hands to wave properly etc.

Keep chatting with your child, encourage animal sounds or noises when playing with cars/rockets and definitely follow up on getting his name down for speech and language support.

He did have some words and babbling though? This why I am so worried as he literally has nothing to build from ? He doesn’t seem to retain anything. And his understanding is all there just no words or even speech sounds or play sounds

Did he babble at all before he started talking? Did he say words and then lose them ?