Nine month old not babbling yet, how unusual is this?

[Luckymummyx3]

My 9m old isn’t babbling yet - no bababa/dadadad etc. she’s not silent by any means, she squeals (with happiness and upset), coos and makes noises but I just wouldn’t describe any of them as babbling. She’s not my first and my first two babies were definitely babbling by this age so I’m a bit anxious. How unusual is this? The health visitor asq suggests 3 words by this point as well which we definitely definitely don’t have. (All other areas she seems to be on track and very similar to my first two).

My child had 4 words at 2 and is now totally fine. He spoke at 2 and 3 mo with no issues.

Really try to relax, she makes noises and likely in her head they mean something.

Totally normal. Idk any babies that were properly babbling at nine months. (There's a sort of pre-babble that younger babies do, I guess, but proper babble comes quite late, I thought.)

Three words at this age seems very unlikely. I think at 14 months my baby had three words (including mama and dada) and that was on par with other kids her age.

One of mine wasn’t babbling at 9 months. HV just said to keep an eye on it. She did start babbling around 10 months. First word at 13 months. She’s a teen now and frankly I could do with less talking as she literally never stops. 😂 No reason for why she was a little later. She’s has no SEN or any issues in school.

Speech and language therapist/ granny of two under twos here.

Absolutely right to keep your eye on the amount of babble. I always think with babies that monitoring change over time is more important than a yes/no type evaluation using questions such as “does baby do this?”.

1. Check hearing again. It can fluctuate.
2. Make sure that baby is not exposed to screen time (no mobiles or tablets, but a tv can be ok some of the time). Ban any of the “cartoons on steroids”. Also don’t assume that people like Ms Rachel are helpful.
3. Interact, play and sing. It should be fun at this age.

@Ilovemyfam thank, yes she doesn’t have any screen time at all, she can do things like clap and likes songs etc. my feeling is her hearing is good (she turns when her name is spoken and dislikes loud surprise noises eg a dog barking) but I could get it checked.
I wonder is she will start soon @mindutopia , I’m just not sure I feel it! Whereas crawling feels very imminent! But yes if she’s anything like me, she won’t shut up once she starts!

When it comes to hearing I always think we are being overly cautious when we ask for a test. It is just that there could be a loss that is specific to speech frequencies. Also there are progressive hearing losses. In my career it has only happened a couple of times. A hearing test is not invasive so the recommendation is always to test.

After that keep having fun interacting 😊