Best childcare for speech delayed DS

[firsttimer08]

It seems that DS (14 months) may have speech delay. I work full time and our nanny is leaving I am wondering now whether it may be better for ds to go to nursery instead, as interaction with other children may help his speech. On the other hand, the nursery i'd send him to full time has many children and they don't appear to receive full attention.

Any views would be appreciated.
Thanks !

Obviously you know your ds, but I must say ime of working in childcare it's perfectly normal for 14 month olds to have no words, "selective hearing" when asked to do things, and be unable to do a shape sorter.

I nanny for a perfectly normal 17 month old and she only has one real word and an all-purpose animal noise, and has only been saying those in the last couple of months. Sometimes she'll follow commands if they happen to coincide with what she wants to do anyway, but often she ignores me. And she can't match the right shapes to the right holes in a shape sorter - she'll try to bash one into any old hole and then get frustrated and give up almost immediately.

that is good to know. Its the same with DS he gets frustrated immediately with the shape sorter.

On the other hand, just reading around the stacking up blocks could be a sign of autism too and here i was quite happy that ds has learnt to stack up blocks.

i hope its a case of me over-reacting ....

I think it's great that you are being so pro active - if your fears are unfounded then you won't have done your ds any harm, in fact the techniques advised to encourage communication in suspected ASD children are fantastic for NT children too. It's great that he can stack blocks and i don't think you should read too much into it as it is not a good indicator of ASD one way or the other at such a young age (it might be if a 5 year old child could do nothing except stack bricks). It will be good for developing hand eye co ordination and for cognitive development. What happens if you intrude into his world by helping to build the tower or by knocking it over ? I think it is quite normal to bash away at a shape sorter as persistance is key to normal development, on the other hand a fleeting attention span and failure to persist with a task is fairly common in young ASD children but it would have to be part of a wider picture to mean anything.

My oldest didn't have any proper words by 14 months. She also couldn't do a shape sorter till she was about three. But by 18 months she had 100+ words... 14 months is very little. That's not to say that your ds won't have a language delay - what is your gut feeling (rather than what hv etc are saying)?