My little boy is coming up to 30 months old and he does not say words apart from mama, dada and nana.
He has been babbling since he was about 8 months old but I have not seen much improvement since then. I will stress that his understanding is very good i.e. if we tell him to fetch his sippy cup or a toy he will happily do this for us. His gross motor skills are also fine, it's mainly the communication that is an issue.
DH and I are trying our hardest to encourage him to speak but it's just not happening. If he wants something he will either point, or take us by the hand and lead us to what he wants, which is usually food. He will not say what he wants and if we give him a choice, he gets very upset and starts throwing tantrums, which I guess boils down to the fact he is frustrated that he cannot speak.
He does mimic what we say and he is trying to repeat words when I talk to him, but it's mostly phonetic. For example, if I say dog, he says 'da' and 'ga' for cat. For longer words such as accident he says 'Ah ee Da' but then does not attempt it again. His hearing is fine as he is responsive to us but try as I might I cannot get him to talk.
At present he is in a childcare setting 3 days a week with other children his age and slightly younger who can speak. The childminder provides lots of activities but there has been no improvement with speech.
I referred him to speech therapy on the advice of a community nurse during his 24 month review (our new HV has only ever seen us once and makes no attempt to engage). It was a phone appointment when he was 28 months old and they could hear DS in the background. They could understand my concerns but did not make any suggestions apart from continuing to engage with him and ruled out autism. They said to contact again if there was no improvement within 3 months.
I'm at a loss as to what to do to openly encourage him to speak. We read to him loads, use flash cards, sing nursery rhymes etc but for the most part he just wants to run, climb or spin (rotation schema has been present since he was very little). I will add that he was very late with crawling (24 months), getting up to stand (22 months) and climbing (25 months) so maybe I should expect that he will speak later too.
Has anyone had a child in the same situation? When did they finally start speaking and what did you do to encourage it?
Sorry for the long post, just trying to cover everything we have done to help him out!