Many times, when faced with a language problem or if they see that their child does not speak as much as the other children in their environment, the parents ask what can they do to help stimulate language of his son.
It is important to know that if you have a mother / father-child relationship in which the affection, serenity and a good verbal stimulation are prime, the development will be adequate. When we talk to him when we feed him or when we give him a bath, we are preparing him to communicate verbally.
The most important thing when we are talking to our son is that we must adapt our language to the child, and not inverted. And for this, then, we will give some practical advice to do it properly.
Naturally, we must stimulate the child naming the things and activities we do together: "Take the pacifier", "look at the bottle", "we put on our socks" ... Thus, the child will learn that each object is assigned a specific name.
It is convenient speak more slowly than usual, but without breaking our intonation, accent or tone. It's not about talking like robots. In addition, we must pronounce the words clearly, slightly exaggerating the pronunciation of the sounds.
On the other hand, we must use simple phrases adapted to the level of production and understanding of the child; You should never use excessively childish or distorted language, not forgetting to always call things by their name or with the same words or phrases (we must avoid speaking Ned Flanders style: the little plane, the lounge, the pacifier ...).
Many times we forget, when we appreciate that it is delayed in the acquisition of sounds and vocabulary, which children understand before expressing themselves. Therefore, there are many situations in which we require the child to pronounce a word correctly: "say car", "repeat with me: car", "again" ... If the child has not yet reached the stage in which You can repeat correctly, you are pressed and demand too much. Therefore, if later when he was able, he refused to speak and did not want to say anything at all, it would not be strange.
Therefore, it is very important to talk with the child but no demands or pressures to do it; Many of the language problems arise in this aspect because it is the parents who, by force, force the child to do things as they want and when they want, without thinking about the child's abilities and motivations.
What we can do is emphasize words or phrase types that we want the child to learn to say better, often repeating them in a natural way and in several different ways, but with the same message ("look at the car", "here is the car", "the car makes brummmbrummm", " How the car runs! "...).
But most importantly, it is speak often to the child in all those situations in which we are doing or looking at things together: at lunch, while taking a walk, playing, during the bath, watching a story ...
The most advisable thing is to talk to him about what he shows most interest in. We will refer to present events, whatever "here and now", for being the easiest.
While we talk with the child, what we can do is use:
- loud self-instructions: that is, we talk about what we are doing so that the child is receiving simple language models accompanied by some action (for example, when we are collecting laundry from the laundry, we are saying things like "I am going to take the red shirt "," here are mom's pants ... ").
- speak parallel: on this occasion, the adult talks about what the child does as an accompaniment to their interactions (if the child is keeping the toys in his toy box, we will say out loud that "the child is taking the red truck "," How well you keep the ball in its place! "...).
Adapting our language to that of the child is something parents can do to help stimulate the child's language. In short we will talk about other ways to enhance and promote communicative exchanges with the child, as well as some techniques that can help the child learn to speak better.
