How can I help non verbal 27 month old

[Woodlandwitch]

My son doesn’t talk, yet has a good understanding of conversations people have with him.
He just nods, shakes his head or points.
He doesn’t say daddy, mummy or anything else I notice others of his age and younger saying.

What can I do to help him?
I work nearly full time so only have evenings and weekends with him in general and I’m wondering if there are any tools I can get to help him communicate?

He gets extremely frustrated when he can’t get across what he wants and I generally spend a lot of the time when I’m with him going through things to work out what it is he wants. Whether it’s something to watch on tv or something to eat or drink.

Some people have commented that he needs to learn to talk to help his frustrations and I’m realising that there is just no sign of anything.

He almost seems like he just doesn’t want to talk

Mine is the same and the SALT suggested learning a few makaton signs and using those eg for drink hungry etc. You can YouTube them.

I also keep language simple so car rather than blue car with lots of repetition. No distractions from TV etc and trying to get him to see your face when you talk.

When I say no TV I mean make sure there’s times you do the above when there are no distractions.

It’s frustrating at time :(

When children learn to talk there is a lot the need to do first in order to be confident about talking. If he is understanding then this is encouraging. Is he at nursery? Do they have concerns? If so ask them to make a referral to SALT. Turn taking games such as rolling a ball back and forth, singing nursery rhymes, reading books and giving your child 10 seconds to respond are all good places to start. Also match plus one is another good strategy eg when your child says "car" you repeat what they said then add a word eg "big car" "blue car" this way you are building their word association. A 2yr old should know about 50 ish words then there is a massive jump to around 300 words for a 3 year old and between the age of 2 and 3 they should be starting to put words together to form simple sentences. I have attached a photo to show you the pyramid of using words. The foundation for talking lies with listening and attention. Hope this helps