Should I be worried about 18 month old’s speech?

[Billynomatesonhere]

My boy is 18 months old and is behind with his speech but not sure if I should be worried yet…

As background, he was very slow to babble - much more focussed on crawling and his dexterity skills. I approached my HV for advice but never heard back, and at his 9-12 month review he had started making some sounds so the HV I saw at that appt wasn’t too worried.

He’s now 18 months and can say Mamma, Dadda & Nanna. He can say some other words (e.g. up, no, ball, car, kick) in the right context but his pronunciation isn’t right on any of these. For example, he will pronounce ‘car’ as ‘kaaarrr’ or ‘no’ as ‘naaah’. He also can do animal noises but again none of them are quite right.

Just wondering if this is normal or not?

BTW, I always repeat back the word he says in the right pronunciation. I talk to him all the time, we read lots together etc. He’s a very confident little boy and good with eye contact, is interested in other children so I don’t have any worries there, it’s just his speech.

At 18 months you don’t need to worry yet. It’s at age 2 they check speech as before then there’s so much range in development. Both my DCs were slow to speak and at 18 months similar to yours. They scraped through the speech part of the 2 year check. Now age 2.5 and 5 years they have both caught up and soak very well.

I wouldn’t be worried, there’s a range of normal.

My son don’t speak until he was 2. He is autistic but he had plenty of signs other than the slow talking and there wasn’t much they’d have done even if they somehow diagnosed it when he was 1! He did learn to speak very quickly once he decided to start.

It sounds like you’re doing all the right things. Do you have any concerns about his hearing? That’s the only thing that might be worth looking at at this point.

Speaking is complex. He sounds fine and everything you're doing sounds sensible. As per your post, he is more focused on movement large and small.
Can he walk?
Can he manage his clothing/shoes?
Can he use (children's) cutlery/feed himself?
Can he follow directions? e.g. 'Come here/come sit with me' 'Let's put on your coat & shoes' 'Climb into the car'

A niece saw a speech specialist and they confirmed that animal noises are 'words'. Also, I've known plenty who had wonky pronunciation at first and turned out fine later. My own DD1 had terrible pronunciation for a long time. She's at uni now on a BBC offer.

My boy us nearly 2 and a half and can't say as many words as your little boy. Nursery have just referred him to speech therapy. I wouldn't worry just yet 😊

Totally within the parameters for normal development.

IIRC the expectation is at least 6 different words that are consistently correct in context. So if every animal is “cow”, for example, but he never refers to anything other than an animal as “cow”, the context is correct and his usage is consistent.

Pronunciation will come. One of my dc started pre-school perfectly capable of complex conversations, but was treated as pre-verbal because his pronunciation was so poor that they thought he was babbling. But once I explained that ds could not yet say f v th s r sounds, they learned to understand his toddler English. TBH even I did not understand everything he said at that age.

Another ds had even fewer words than yours at 18m. Both my boys are bright, academically able young men. They give presentations and talk very well.

I can remember asking for advice when my DC2 wasn’t talking and how worrying it can be.

Ine thing I would recommend is doing this simple progress checker from Speech & Language UK. They’re a very well respected charity and it will tell you if he needs some support. Let us know if it does and we can advise you on what to do next