11MO not babbling

[Jannt86]

Hi all. I recently adopted a baby girl. Things are great and generally seem on track. My gut instinct is that she's quite a bright and inquisitive girl. However, I'm just a bit concerned that her vocalising is not very advanced. She tends to squeal or babble vowel sounds. I don't really hear any consonant sounds. I'm really trying to teach her simple things like 'uh oh' and I talk to her including babbling all the time and I sing and read to her. She's a very social baby and enjoys clapping, pointing to things, waving and has a wicked sense of humour. She also seems to understand quite a bit of what I say to her (claps when I tell her to without visual cue, gives me things when she is asked again without visual cue and I've just started asking her to show me some body parts and she will do it when she feels like it) she's very on the go though and I really have to pick my moments with her ITO reading and teaching her things because most of the time she's not got the attention for it. Unfortunately with her being adopted we missed the chance to talk and babble to her when she couldn't wriggle away lol. I'm not sure how much foster family did this with her but she did seem to have been very loved and cared for. Were any of your babies late babblers and what was the outcome ultimately? Were any problems identified? The only things I can really think is to get her hearing checked and that it might just be genetic (one parent did have mild LD) would be very grateful for any input. Thanks xx

Hi, my dd was a relatively late babbler- started at about 9 1/2 months with 'baba' and a few weeks later 'dada' but very infrequently. She has just turned 1 this last week and it's only in the past couple of weeks that she has started babbling more. Her babbling does, however, seem more deliberate than other babies though if that makes sense? She doesn't babble much gibberish like lots of other babies, but seems to have gone straight to words in that she uses mama, dada, baba (for baby), nana, Peppa (for Peppa pig) all in the correct context. She is also trying to say ball, bird, Apple and weirdly enough zebra!

The lack of babbling did worry me for a while but like your LO dd is fab with her gestures, receptive language, pointing at body parts, joining in actions to nursery rhymes etc so not too concerned at all any more. I think they all get there in there own way at their own pace, although I must admit late babbling and lack of localisation does seem to be less common. Most babies I meet are right little chatterboxes!

Maybe have a chat to your HV and see what they think? X

Your DD sounds absolutely lovely Jannt

Have you come across Talking Point yet? It has progress checkers and some resources to aid speech development.

One thing that it might be worth doing is the m-Chat. Just to rule out ASD as delayed speech can be a sign. It's probably not ASD though, from what I understand lots of adopted babies do have sone speech delay.

Have you found the Adoption boards on here yet too? There's sone very helpful and experienced MNers in there