My Toddler Understands But Isn’t Talking

So if your child does understand you but isn't talking, there might be a few reasons why. The first thing is to know whether this is a speech or a language problem. It might be both. So let me just define what speech and language means. So speech just means the sounds that are coming out of my mouth. Can a child or a person create speech sounds correctly? So that's a speech problem. The language itself is the medium, is the message. Is that core concepts that you're trying to say? So you can have someone who can say all the speech sounds but unable to create sentences. Right? That's also a possibility. Right. So other than that, to know this properly, you got to get an assessment. We'll talk about this later. Children actually use other ways to compensate in order to understand us, what we say. All right, so when you say, or a parent all the time, like parents all the time, they say, oh, my toddler understands everything I say. It's just that they don't speak. But how sure are you that your child can actually understand you? Right? So they can look at where you're pointing, where your eyes are looking at. They can determine what you're saying by using the tone, whether it's good or bad thing. So that's something you have to understand, is that maybe they don't truly understand you 100% actually. And we use this strategy for a lot of things. When we're in a foreign country, we decide what the person is saying to us with the gestures, with the eyes, with how the context looks like if it's about, like a dinner about to start, you can smell the food. Obviously if someone goes like this and says something, then you know you're supposed to go there and sit down. Same as when you give your child a piece of rubbish. Where else can he show the rubbish? Of course, in the rubbish bin. Doesn't matter if you say something else. So I want you to check your child's true ability by doing something very simple, is that you give them a scrunched up piece of tissue that's like rubbish. You give it to them and you say, hey, put this on the sofa. Let's see, what's he going to do? Right? I think 80% of the time they actually just throw it in the bin because they truly didn't understand out of context kind of command. So if your child looks at you funny is like, what's going on, sofa? What the heck? Then most probably they understand your command. So you have to check, right? But that doesn't mean you can check everything because in speech and language therapy, there's something called a breakdown level. So in terms of compensation, there's different levels of comp. In terms of comprehension, there are different levels of comprehension. So I cannot just tell you every level here for you to check at home. That'd be pretty hard. So you need to get an assessment. And no matter what kind of assessment you do, it comes down to language and speech. And for speech, we're talking about stuff like is he able to understand commands, is he able to speak in how many words, sentences, is he able to make sentences in the correct grammar and structure and so on, and speech. And this is where some of the nuances come in. Because speech is very complicated. There might be things that like the structure deficits, there might be hearing loss, there might be a lot of things to the reason why your child is able to understand you somewhat with compensatory strategies and still won't talk, right? So speech is something that is very nuanced and you need a professional to see because the very diagnosis of it will actually tell you exactly how to treat it. So we're talking about maybe some structural problems. It might be like a lip or a cleft palate. It could be a tongue tie. Very low percentage, actually much less than what people think. We might be dealing with other problems such as apraxia of speech, dysarthria. All these are like very low percentage things. But you still need to get it checked out just because it might be. And to be very honest with you, you can only get a proper diagnosis that is very accurate. Accurate after the age of three from some of the speech sound disorders that I was talking about. And other than that, of course, you have to check for autism spectrum disorder. That's something you have to check. Let me tell you some strategies so you can boost language development at this point in time because you don't have a proper assessment about this stuff. We can start off with the things that we use anyways for anyone. So when someone is non verbal, so to speak, if like your child is non verbal, because the title of this video is they understand, but it won't talk. So you can start teaching using some gestures, right? You can start using some gestures to teach them how to ask for opening something. You can ask for something to turn on something, right? Turn on the light. Teach gestures. Teach baby signing. These are well documented about the benefits of language development. And even if it's a speech impediment, because they cannot make speech sounds, then having something to fall down on is actually good. And we actually made another video, a whole few videos about sign language and baby signing. It doesn't impede language development and verbal language. There's a reason why we all speak more than we gesture, right? It's because speaking is a lot more efficient and there are people who are going to say no. That's, that's nuanced. How can you say that? Just look at how we are communicating on a day to day basis. Right? I think that's it for today. If you need more help please go to agents of Speech.com course we have free, free courses for you to watch there totally free of charge and you can go there and learn yourself. It's inside of our parents community at this time of recording we have like 4000 something parents inside already all learning and ready to go. All right, so that's it for today's video. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye.