Why You Should Stop Teaching “I Want” Phrases To Your Delayed Child, Pt 1

When I see parents or therapists or in general people who are teaching delayed children, they always go into the I want sentences. I want sentences are actually worse than short phrases that have a subject and a verb or a verb or object because when you're teaching someone linguistics of a certain language or any type of language, it's all about their understanding of sentence structure, grammar of where the words should go in different places. Let's say I'm not in English the whole thing goes svo subject, verb, object in that order. That and it helps a child to learn a sentence. So the goals of the therapy I see I want the cookie and the next step the therapist will think mommy comma I want the cookie or like it would be mommy can I please have the cookie? All of these have a lot of semantic value because it's literally saying the same thing. A child could say cookie and still convey the same meaning as mommy catch.