17 month old no words?

[HappyBiscuit]

Hi all!
so my DS is 17 months and a physically very well developed boy, always hit milestones early until recently, he started saying mama, dada, hiya etc around 13 months or so however recently he seems to have regressed slightly, he babbles all day long and Is fully understanding most things we say but no longer will say his few words, instead of ‘hiya’ it’s turned to ‘yayaya’ and maybe I’ll get a mama if he’s in the mood.
I was just wondering if anyone has any tips on how to get the ball rolling with his speech, he is great with gestures and getting good at animal noises (mainly just saying rawr at everything but you know). I have come to the conclusion that he is a very stubborn boy and will only show his tricks on his terms, but let me know if you have any similar experiences and anything that can help me encourage a few more words. Thanks! :)

Baby signing

This happened with my now 10 year old. I remember myself and health visitor were extremely concerned as from what I remember she was over 2 years old, I had a session booked for speech therapy but about a week before the appointment she started talking, full sentences too, and TBH she never stopped since, in 10 years😂

My theory, which has usually come true is that a child is a walker or a talker.
My son was super fast at talking, but much slower on walking and nappy training etc. there’s no one size fits all.
Saying that, if you are concerned, especially with the regression, you should mention it to your health visitor.

My son was under speech and language therapy as had <10 words at 24 months which I believe is the earliest ‘speech’ milestone. At that point they assess hearing and comprehension/eye contact etc.

Some of the speech therapy advice was pretty basic to be honest - speak to him, read to him 🤔 and sometimes I felt like they thought I just stuck him in front of the tv when that couldn’t have been further than the truth! The actual constructive things that we were advised were-

Leave a predictable word gap in a sentence or song, for instance in the book ‘Dear Zoo’ it repeats ‘I sent him back’ in every page - so read it to him and say ‘I sent him….. long pause’ so leaving space for him to say a known familiar word but not actually directing him to say it.

Put high value stuff (in our case usually toy cars or milk) in sight and out of reach - ‘you want the……?’

Play 1,2,3, go! And throw them up in the air on the ‘go’ then stop saying ‘go’ and wait for them to say it to be thrown.

It is good advice to flag it up early because it takes a long time to get any proper support. My son started talking properly literally DAYS before he was assessed for a speech intervention nursery (at age almost 3) where he chattered away to the speech therapist and made us out to be liars….