In this post, we will be providing you some methods on how to teach a baby to talk so that you can do the necessary things that are essential for helping your kids to learn the first few words and further develop their language skills.
One of the main focus of parents is to communicate with their kids and most parents start to worry when they see that they are not succeeding in teaching their kids to speak but one should always keep in mind that these skills are developed quickly in case of some kids whereas other kids may take a long time to utter their first words. Your job as a parent is to encourage them to express themselves by learning the language which they will naturally do by observing you and other people in their surroundings.
Below we will be discussing some methods that you can use to help your toddler talk and we will also tell you about the time period after which you should seek a professional help if there is a delay in the speech.
Before Birth
A lot of people fail to understand the importance of talking to kids when they are in their mother’s womb. A baby’s brain starts to learn things from their surroundings right after 24-25 weeks of pregnancy. Hence you should talk to your kid when they are inside a mother’s womb and read to them various stories whereas listening to music with lots of melodies also helps in the development of the kid’s brain before birth.
Crying Is the First Form of Communication
A baby cries to express its needs, emotions, and feelings. This is the first tool that they use to express themselves, so it is an opportunity for you to teach them the other ways to interact. When your baby cries you can point out to the things that they might be wanting and provide them with whatever they need while conversing with them about it. This helps your baby to understand the names and labels that are used to describe the particular things that they frequently require.
Baby Talk
Imitating your baby by using baby talk is an excellent way to interact with them. When you talk like them to point out the objects that they are trying to bring to your attention, you are encouraging them to use more sounds and signals to express themselves.
Baby talk is good for helping kids who are 1-10 months old, but using it after they have learned a few words is not advisable.
Environment
At an early age, a baby’s brain is developing rapidly so it absorbs information very quickly from its surroundings. To teach any particular skill to babies you should make them grow up in an environment which is conducive to learning those particular set of skills.
So to promote the language learning ability of your baby you should raise them in an environment where people use that particular language a lot, listening to the conversations frequently will naturally help your kid to learn the usage of words quickly.
Talk to Them Frequently
The more time you will take to talk to your baby, the better it will be for their speech development. Speak to them as much as possible without thinking that it is of no use just because they do not understand the language yet.
You can narrate to your kids about whatever you are doing and give them your attention by involving them in your talks. Make sure to talk slowly by sitting in front of them so that they can process the sounds and read your lips while observing you.
Using simple words frequently while pointing towards the things about which you are talking will help your kid’s brain to make the necessary association between the words and their meanings. Also when you are having a conversation with your baby, watch how they respond to various words and join with them by imitating their expressions.
Observe
After 3-4 months, a baby begins to express themselves in various ways, so it becomes important for you to keep observing them in order to find the right time to teach them certain words.
Understand what they are trying to say and make the word more clear for them by repeating it. Babies learn to speak by imitating you, they copy the tone of their parents and make sounds that they hear in their surroundings. Use this opportunity by explaining to them the names of things that they want before bringing it to them.
Playing
Playing is the best way to teach any particular skill to your kid, so you should spend time with your kid to play various games that they love. Simple games like “peek-a-boo” help your kid to learn new sounds and you will start to see them repeating your words quickly.
Appreciation and Attention
It is very important that you should praise your kid whenever they succeed in learning a new word, celebrate the moment by giving them some reward for their achievement, it will encourage them to repeat the word and learn more.
Kids love to get the attention of their parents, so giving importance to their efforts in learning the language will act as a motivation for them and they will try to learn more words to impress you.
Read Books with Pictures
Reading books to your kid that contains a lot of images will help you to make them learn new words. Books give you a chance to teach the name of the objects to your kids by pointing towards the images.
Even when your kid has not learned how to speak, reading such books will help their brain to make sense of the meanings of the various sounds which will be useful to them in the future.
These were some methods that you can use to help your kid’s speech development. The various phases of speech development are as follows:-
Kids who are 1-4 months old will express themselves by cooing and gurgling, this is how they will make their initial sounds and you should encourage them to make more such sounds to express themselves.
When the kid is about 4-8 months old, they will start to babble a lot. During this phase or a little later, they will begin to make different sounds.
Kids usually utter their first word anytime near their first birthday, and when they are about 18 months old they should have learned about 10-12 words or more and here you can see a rapid growth in their speech development. If your kid has not learned to speak more than 10 words at this age, then you should visit a speech-language therapist.
We hope you found this post useful, for some expert advice and strategies we recommend you to opt for the program named “Toddler Speech Delay“.
Here’s a video for you on how to help toddlers to talk:-
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I absolutely love the fact of how you addressed the part of ‘before birth’. Many people now still think that the development of humans only start after they enter the world, when in fact, there are many scientific articles out that have already proven that a human’s development starts in the womb, from the time that the brain starts to develop.
Speaking to young children is definitely very important. I’ve read somewhere (I forgot where I got it from, but I remember it is a scholarly article) that the difference between two children at age 5, the child who is frequently spoken to hears approximately 30 million more words than the child who is not really spoken to. Imagine the amount of vocabulary that a child can learn when frequently spoken to!
However, it’s really sad that some parents still have the thinking that children don’t understand half of what they are speaking and hence do not really speak with their children unless necessary or they feel like it. I really appreciate how you are spreading this around to the parents around the world and providing them with a way -reading picture books with their children- to create more quality and language-related time with their children.
Thank you for your response. We are very grateful for the time you have taken out to read our content and for writing such a thoughtful comment. Talking to your kid before birth is always the first step any parent should take for their child and surely it affects your child’s development in many ways.