Why Isn’t My Child Talking Yet?

My frustration levels have hit an all time high. Why isn’t my child talking yet? I am sick of hearing people telling me the same thing. “He’ll start talking when he’s ready” or “he understands everything we’re saying” or “he’ll just come out with it one day” or “once he does start talking, you’ll wish he wasn’t”. Enough. Please. Just enough. I can’t take hearing one of those phrases anymore.

You see, this time last year I was hoping that by now I’d be able to at least have a basic conversation with Toby, whether that was one sided or with getting responses from him. I was hoping that he might understand a bit more than he actually does. Toby’s 2 years and 8 months and in that time he has excelled at every other development milestone and thing he’s put his mind to.

He crawled at 7 months, walked at 9 months and started babbling saying ‘hello’ and ‘clock’. Will he say those two words now? No. Not for love, nor money or chocolate, which says a lot because he’ll do most things for “choc” (one of the words he knows VERY well – typical!).

Now I’m not saying my son is a mute, far from it, he doesn’t shut up. But I literally can not understand a word he is saying. It’s his own little language and he will talk at me as if I know exactly what he’s going on about, but I don’t. At the moment it’s hard to find the balance of talking back to him as though we’re having an actual conversation, or telling him I don’t know what he means. I don’t want my son to think I’m ignoring him, but equally I don’t want him to think I can understand his baby babble.

Don’t get me wrong, he has some vocabulary and it’s building slowly, but if it goes any slower, I’m afraid we’ll stop. You’re probably wondering why I’m so concerned. There are infinite reasons and we aren’t the only ones who have noticed Toby’s speech is not quite there. Here are the main concerns we have;

• He clearly wants to potty train. He absolutely hates having a bum change and it’s getting more and more difficult to change him because he’s lashing and kicking out at us to the point where we have to sometimes physically restrain him just to wipe him up. He shows interest in the potty, he gets it out and sits on it every time we go in his bedroom. We are obviously very encouraging and supportive when he shows interest, but he loses it very quickly.
• He starts school next September (2017). Yes, it’s 18 months off, but we just don’t know when his speech will pick up. In this time, we have a lot of basic things to teach him, the above being one! You also have to bear in mind he will only just be 4 – his birthday is the 30th August so he’ll be in at the deep end. Deferring his start is something we are considering, but this decision will ultimately be made a bit closer to the time and in line with school policy.

• Toby can’t take instructions. He’s been at Water Babies since he was 1, and he loves swimming, but we are about to come to the end of his lessons as we’ve pulled the plug on them. Unfortunately, he has not progressed anywhere near as much as we’d hoped and literally every other child in his class is now able to follow the slightly more challenging instructions. You can’t reason, explain or show him anything because he genuinely just has no idea what you’re talking about.

• The last reason is a bit of a vanity claim really. We just want to be able to communicate with our son to get basic information from him about his needs/wants as a child. It’s so difficult to know what he wants because he just makes a noise through his nose if he can’t say something, he won’t even try.

As I said though, his vocabulary is improving and he can say quite a few words, but none that are particularly relevant – they’re pretty random actually. Quick, go, car, gone, stuck, truck, choc, bird, book etc. He rarely says “a” before anything other than “a ball”, and he will occasionally say “I want ..” but I don’t think he really understands what that means.

So, what are we doing to help him and ourselves? Makaton is one thing. A type of sign language and he’s picked up a couple of words really quickly. Although trying to get him to understand the difference between please and thank you is difficult especially as they are so similar. It’s definitely something we’re going to keep working on as he’s responded beautifully and has been able to tell us when he wants a drink!

We had a hearing test in January, which was inconclusive so we had another one a couple of weeks ago which showed he had glue ear in his right ear, and now we have to wait another 3 months to get tested again to see if it clears up on its own. I understand the wait, but what if he had glue ear in January? It’s delayed any treatment and speech development by another 3 months which is beyond frustrating.

If he does still have it in 3 months time he’ll then be referred to ENT which will take ages. Then he’ll have an assessment for treatment, and then it’ll probably be another 3 months before that happens, and by then it might as well be Christmas! It’s so annoying having to wait for things like this.

His nursery and I are working together by keeping each other informed on any developments and we had quite a lengthy meeting with her a couple of weeks ago. She has referred Toby to the speech and language therapists because while he is physically way ahead of other children (balance of a 4.5 year old apparently) she is concerned that his speech is holding him back as it’s at the stage of an 18-20 month old. I actually spoke with a speech therapist who said our referral has been noted, but it will be at least 10 weeks before an appointment. Hurray, yet another mountain we have to climb before we even think about getting anywhere.

Until then it’s just a case of trying to have basic conversations, speaking clearly, word games and Makaton! I do still ask myself ‘why isn’t my child talking yet?’ but hopefully we will find answers soon.

If you’ve had a similar experience, I’d really love any words of wisdom if you have any to share.