Ming shares three practical tips for parents of speech-delayed children: speak slower and articulate clearly, use shorter sentences or single words, and add meaningful gestures to reinforce communication. If your child isn't talking by age two, these strategies can help.
If your child isn't speaking by the age of two, then you must be very worried. And during this pandemic, it's literally impossible to feel safe to go outside to get professional advice. And so that's why in this video, I want to tell you three tips that I always tell my clients, my students on the first trip to the clinic. Okay? So tip number one is to speak slower and articulate as clearly as you can so that it increases the chance that your child can comprehend all the sounds coming out from her mouth. Okay? So once you do that, tip number two is actually to speak in shorter sentences. I know there is a lot of advice out there telling you to describe as much as you can, but think about it. Put yourself in their shoes. If you don't understand anything and someone talks as if you understand in long sentences, you will be confused. And if your child isn't speaking yet, then I would advise you to stick to one word at a time. Okay? There's a long standing debate whether, you know, we should use grammatically correct sentences or, you know, just using telegraphic meaning. Like, I can just say, mommy, eat something like that. It doesn't matter. You can stick to using grammatically correct sentences in short phrases like, mommy's eating. Right. It doesn't make too much of a difference. Okay, so it brings us to the last tip. The last tip is actually used to use more gestures in your everyday communication. All right? And that's not just pointing. Okay? That's not just pointing. You can use gestures such as eating, you know, drinking, putting. It's up to you. You can make it up as you go. But the biggest reason why I'm telling you to do this is because it adds more meaning. It adds more information to how we communicate with our children. Okay? So these are the three tips. If you found this helpful, please share out to other parents who might need this information. My name is Ming. I'm a speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com and hopefully I will see you in more videos in the coming days. Thanks.
