Non babbling / non verbal 2 year old?!

[Klippin]

My little boy is 2 years 4 months and is non-verbal. He has very little babbling and has never really gone through the typical “bababa/dadada/mamama” stage.

His understanding is good and he communicates really well non-verbally — pointing, signing, gestures, good eye contact and joint attention. He’s very social and engaged with us, but producing speech sounds seems incredibly difficult for him.
I’d really love to hear from parents whose child was similar at this age, particularly children who had little or no babbling as well as no words.

Did your child eventually start talking? If so, at what age, and did you ever find out what was causing the difficulty?

Positive stories especially welcome ❤️

My ds had speech therapy at that age and learnt makaton : despite my misgivings the science is that signing while speaking leads to speech development and it works. He’s now grade 7 speech and drama and we can’t stop him talking.

however, his lack of speech and speech sounds was picked up by me, the HV and GP at age one and a referral to SALT started then. By age 2 we were doing lots of work to get him speaking. By age 3 he had improved hugely and age 4 he had surpassed his peers.

i was taught to constantly talk to him like I was David Attenborough narrating a documentary about my life… everyone in the house had to always talk talk talk. We also went to baby singing, sing and sign, baby music : lots of classes in the community as well as the speech therapy exercises.