so, when should i get worried about toddler not talking?

[thisisyesterday]

ds2 is 2 years and 4 months.
I don't think I am worried yet, but i am certainly starting to see more and more of a gap open up between him and his peers.
he is getting so frustrated at not being able to tell me what he wants.

on paper he has quite a lot of words that he is able to say.
in reality he rarely says most of them, and some of them he has said a few times and then never again.

he also doesn't say words that you might expect him to say. he can't/won't say drink, or milk for example. He has only just started to refer to his dummy (calls it bean!)

he doesn't string any words together. although he did once say "fish man" and "bad baby" lol

It is very difficult though when your child DOES understand and yet speech is very very limited.

Though, I had a bit of excitement yesterday morning.....it is very very small, but I am guessing there are others on this thread will "get" my joy!

DS is very much into robots atm. We bought him a little R2D2.

He came down the stairs on Sat am holding him and when i picked him up he held him up to me and he said "D2" YAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!

No idea Lady. To fund their research perhaps?
SALTS can often lend it or you can order it from your library. Half of mumsnet special needs board has ordered it from her library so your chances are good.

It's tricky when you don't know what resource will (hopefully) be the key that turns the lock for you as you could spend so much to no avail. With hindsight, I'd have spend £300 on that particular book but nothing on stuff that others have found great. Some have found "it Takes Two" doesn't help because it essentially assumes that your child is aching to communicate better and doesn't have major sensory issues preventing commuication (there is another book called "More than Words" that starts from the opposite assumption - that you are going to have to motivate your child to want to communicate with you). It also won't help if the problem turns out to be articulation.

There's a cheaper Hanen book, You Make the Difference, that is about £13 on amazon. It has less content/detail than It takes two to talk though...I also used and highly recommend It takes two to talk. You should be able to sell it on on ebay for £20ish if you don't find it useful. Worth seeing what your local library has on this topic - a lot of people recommend Baby Talk by Sally Ward, and it may be in the library.

You will probably find that your SALT course is an attempt to put Hanen principles into practice. But you may find the book easier to focus in on because of its clear prose and superb editing - a well-meaning course-leader can so easily mess things up with a few ill-judged remarks.

sorry I know I shouldn't laugh but at you enduring the course.

I'm going to do some work then post again when I can keep a straight face

Lady - yes, that's the book I meant. Not as good as ItTakesTwo but significantly cheaper!

Have to say that the course sounds quite similar to the course DS did the June before he started school - at that point he was a bit advanced for it tbh, so was mostly a waste of time.(he was put on the waiting list for it several months earlier and had improved in the meantime).

The course I did does sound better than what you describe - there was no parent/free play, instead SALT had a turn taking game as the warm up activity.
It also had snack time LOL. There were at least 2 if not 3 SALTs present in the room - one taking the course, the other(s) taking notes about how the child got on - so at the very end there was a detailed individual feedback session that was very useful.

IME they arrange these courses by level of language - so 2 word/3 word level groups than by age. I don't think the approach for a 3 year old would be that different for a 2 year old, but that you might have slightly higher expectations of behaviour/conformity to group activities for an older child.

So - I think these courses can be useful, I wouldn't dismiss out of hand, but some of the aspects can be grating - there was one SALT at the very first session who insisted children cross their legs when sitting and listening for no apparent reason . I hope they conclude things usefully for you, with some clear next steps at the end of the course.

Oh gosh lady, you have just voiced from experience all of my fears that are to come tomorrow when DS starts

My son is bright, of course I do lots of things with him at home, my DS hardly speaks at all and even the main salt we see thinks he just doesn't want or need to yet so NO CHANCE he would have a go at saying cut......actually he can hardly "have a go" at anything, he either says a word or does not, end of. Oh gawd am DREADING it.

I know this session is going to be based around Ginger the bear.

The most annoying thing is it is between 3pm and 4pm in the city centre so DS will not be at his best by then

Waiting my DS1 was also a fairly early talker and even at 5 doesn't draw breath.

In a car journey at the weekend I noticed that DS2 had just sort of zoned him out - presumably to get some peace and quiet.

However yesterday DS2 said quite a few new words - cool, cow, moo, woof, miaow etc. Very exciting to us.

He is a very placid (lazy) child so fingers crossed all will be well.

Oh gosh, I AM dreading it. the salt I have seen before is really nice but it isn't her doing it, it is two other women who i haven't met yet. if they do the food thing, DS will not be impressed! he hardly eats at the best of times! Plus he likes to cook so prob just want to DO the cutting rather than talk about it, he laready spreads his own butter unaided

I also think about the childhood apraxia, this thread has enlightened me a lot! Def not general dyspraxia though, everything else is spot on, beter than me even.

I shall report back tomorrow.....watch this space!

Well I've done a bit more work now and my kids have miraculously taken themselves off to other people's houses.

I think what you're saying is that both you and your DS communicate in a fundamentally different way when out in public doing strange things for artificial reasons than the way you communicate together privately. This is a key point (read Stanley Greenspan if you want to hear what you're saying put into a doctor's words): for any child who's even remotely shy or self-conscious, a group course is always going to be more about group compliance than anything else (think about yourself as a child if you were even remotely shy). Hanen courses are at least better because a core component is (apparently) that a SALT visits you at home, videos you with your child and provides feedback (though sometimes I think we should start doing that on mumsnet!).

The key Hanen principle is that the "teachable moments" that arise at home are the real times when new skills tend to be learnt. They call it following your child's lead. You have to take this extremely seriously otherwise all your talking like a clown can be in vain. Your child likes what your child likes, which is not necessarily the child-friendly things they produced on the course. So if a non-verbal child has two weetabix in the morning, then on Saturday you provide just one - the child then has a very high motivation to ask you for the other one. If child can't ask, child feels frustrated and you quickly provide the second one saying "MORE, you want MORE. MORE. MORE Weetabix. you wanted MORE" (yes I'm afraid you have to say it five times).

So on these courses they can show the techniques but you can only ever really apply them once you make them your own at home because a "right" technique in a "wrong" place and time just seems a bit silly really.

As for your mother, this is a prime example of why buying the book is a good idea. You can show this book to your mother. It will not freak her out or make her defensive. I cannot stress enough what a rare virtue this is in literature about language development.

The Hanen course is adults only, you don't take your child along. It's basically some videos and slides and discussion to cover the stuff in the book. When we were offered it, I couldn't go due to having a newborn so DH did it and relayed the stuff back to me (the perfect way for us to have done it actually, as had it been the other way around I think the buck would have just stopped with me... though would never actually say that to DH ).

I found the book and video sessions very helpful.

Have been following this thread for a while as my ds (3.3) is seeing a SALT albeit very periodically after I reported a delay at 2. But I think the problem is articulation (is that the right word). His language sounds like it's coming out through a cloud, so snow is 'no', skate is 'kate', mummy is 'nunny' - can't seem to pronounce an awful lot of consonants. When he gets upset or urgent I can barely understand him.
Would any of the books mentioned here help, he doesn't have SALT appt until april. Any other advice would be great.

hmm, accessorize, you'd better ask your SALT - I bet you could email her.

SALT had previously said that his use of language was fine for his age (e.g. no of words, sentence production) but the articulation was behind. Heard a friend's 2yo talking on the weekend and she was 10x clearer than ds at a year younger which really made me worry. SALT said couldn't do much until he was 3, and has waited 6 months to see how things improve & his language in other respects has a lot. It's hard though sometimes to get that he is talking well because most people can't understand a word he says.
Surely he ought to have said his name by now as well, he has never said it! I know he's behind in other areas, can't jump, very unco-ordinated, doesn't seem to grasp some basic things etc.
Thought there might be something I could do with him in the meantime, don't know if I could email her but wouldn't hurt to find out! Thanks lingle.

"Surely he ought to have said his name by now as well"

Yes, I would have thought that he would have done if his language was developing typically. My son also wasn't really using his own name at 3.2/3.3. His older brother would call out "DS2!" in their games and DS2 would joyfully echo "DS2!", "DS2!". You'll be pleased to hear that he knows it very well now! He can come home from nursery telling me that Jake alleged he was three but he isn't, he's four.

"doesn't seem to grasp some basic things etc"
snap again. At 3.3, I was still working on "we're going to Emily's house". DS2 would set off in his buggy thinking we were going to town and would cry when we stopped unexpectedly at Emily's house. .

Again, there are now very few basic things that he doesn't get but it's been a long road. Nothing to do with being "bright" or not "bright". "Bright" is one of the words I'd like to ban from mumsnet.

What sort of basic things does your lad not grasp?

thanks lingle. I guess the same sort of things as you mention - he asks me a question like 'what's that man doing', I tell him and he asks over and over again, just doesn't get it. The physical problems seem more obvious at times, struggling to get up on a couch etc at 3.

I have tbh found it hard not to use the bright/not bright words as his older brother DS1 is so obviously very bright at grasping things and always was, but also had a speech problem with dysfluency and still talks somewhat oddly at 6. I struggled enormously with him last year when he wasn't talking at all and feel ashamed of myself for the way that I thought of him. I'm trying hard now to focus on what he can do and the lovely little person that he is but worrying about him attending school and people not understanding him. I fear I haven't 'got' him and what he needs yet and that's part of the problem with his language. All has been hampered by having twins when he was 21 months!

With four kids you've got a lot on your hands. Are the twins (and you?) sleeping? We were on a thread together in November I think. Is your DS1 doing ok?

I remember also with DS2, having turned 3 I think (or nearly) going up a different path to our house and him running down it for fun as I shouted "no, UP, UP" and realising he wasn't being naughty, he just didn't get that I wanted him to go up not down.

My DS2 turned out to have a receptive language delay, ie a delay in understanding language. I don't know if you're familiar with this concept but it's as if you had done a French A-level and could write a nice essay in French/make a speech in French (perhaps with articulation difficulties if you happen to have those too), but if you actually went to Paris and someone addressed you in French then you wouldn't understand it without relying on visual cues, and you wouldn't really be able to respond in kind. You wouldn't be able to have a two-way conversation.

You might be highly intelligent though.

accessorize - just about the only problem my DS didn't have language wise was pronunciation, so I don't have any personal advice I can give. The Hanen books DO NOT cover pronunication difficulties. Might be worth you getting hold of a library copy of the Parent's Guide to Speech and Language problems by Debbie Feit - as her kids have verbal dyspraxia - it's more a general book than a practical book though.

also try googling Nancy Kaufman and Caroline Bowen - they are v. respected speech therapists with specialisms in pronunication problems and/or dyspraxia and have their own websites.

lingle, don't remember a thread together sorry (I must be on so many!) but ds1 still soiling if that's what it was about (sigh). Feel as though ds2 has missed out on attention because of that issue (plus twins of course). We do all sleep now, which does help ! Phaps SALT will give me more of an idea what the problem with ds2 is at next appointment which would help me understand more what's going on with him.
chaos, thanks for those links, I'll follow them up and hopefully find something that may illuminate the problem for me.