Learning to communicate starts at birth. Babies and young children gain an understanding of communication by watching others around them and participating in meaningful interactions that support the development of early communication skills. Help your child develop their early communication skills with these top tips!
1. Communication Starts with Attention
Young children need to develop their attention to and interest in other people in order to learn how to effectively communicate. You can help your young child develop their attention by:
- Reducing background noise and turning off the TV and other distractions when interacting with your child.
- Practicing joint attention skills by focusing on something together during an interaction (e.g., looking at a book together).
- When possible, creating predictable routines as a part of your child’s day such as bath, books, lullabies, then bed. Young children find it easier to attend and learn when they have the security of routines and know what to expect.
2. Follow Your Child’s Lead
Children learn best when they are interested and engaged in the interaction. By observing your child, you will learn what they are interested in; you then can respond to and expand on what your child enjoys to help develop new skills. For example, if your child enjoys rolling cars back and forth, you can sit with your child and roll cars while making a car noise (“vroom” or “beep-beep”).
3. Be Face-to-Face when possible
Children learning to communicate benefit from seeing the facial expressions of others as well as how sounds are formed when people move their mouths. Being face-to-face with your child gives them the best opportunity to learn these important communication skills from you.
4. Practice ‘Serve and Return’ Interactions
‘Serve and return’ interactions occur when your child (or you) does something (‘serve’) and the other person does something back (‘return’). Games such as rolling a ball back and forth, peek-a-boo, making facial expressions or noises in turn, and taking turns dropping blocks into a container, are all communication building ‘serve and return’ interactions.
5. Model Communication
Children need to hear and see communication to learn to communicate; so talk with your child about what the two of you are doing together and what you see. Use simple language that your child understands, and include nonverbal communication such as facial expressions and gestures in your communicative interactions.
6. Use Expectant Pauses
During routine language interactions, pause and look at your child expectantly to encourage them to actively participate in the communicative exchange.
For children not yet using words, try putting an expectant pause in a motivating interaction. For example, after pushing your child a few times on the swing, pause and look at your child expectantly to let them know you are waiting for them to tell you to keep pushing the swing. Your child may communicate this by making a noise, reaching, or looking toward you.
If your child has newly started using words, use an expectant pause during a verbal routine such as a favourite song or familiar phrase. For example, just before releasing your child to go down the slide you might say “ready, steady…” and wait for your child to say “go!”.
7. Offer Choices
Offering your child a choice by holding up two objects is a great way to encourage communication. Children are naturally motivated to communicate when offered a desired item and giving a visual choice allows your child to communicate through reaching, pointing, vocalizing and/or verbalizing.
8. Match Plus One
When your child starts using words, use ‘match plus one’ to help them learn new words and start to build sentences. With ‘match plus one,’ you repeat what your child says and add one word or concept. For example:
- Child: “Dog” Adult: “Big dog”
- Child: “Mummy car” Adult: “Mummy’s red car”
- Child: “Biscuit” Adult: “Eat biscuit”
- Child: “Baby bed” Adult: “Baby is going to bed” or Baby is tired”
9. Fewer Questions
When children are early communicators, it is easy for adults to get in the habit of asking questions. However, for children not yet using words, answering questions is difficult. Plus children learn language by hearing others use language; hearing too many questions limits a young child’s language learning opportunities. Instead of asking your early communicator a question, comment on what he or she is doing. For example, instead of asking “What are you doing?” or “What do you have?”, comment “You are playing blocks” or “Wow, a big block tower!”.
10. Limit Screen Time
Babies and young children learn best from in-person, face-to-face interactions with you and other important people in their life. Limit screen time to video calls with friends and family so your early communicator has plenty of practice and learning time with face-to-face interactions.
If you would like more information about children’s speech and language, please get in touch. Follow us on Facebook for more speech, language and feeding tips and sign up for South Lakes Speech & Language Therapy’s newsletter if you would like new posts sent directly to your inbox.
