All About Toddler Speech Delays

As children move from infants to toddlers, they begin to use speech to communicate. Some children seem to pick up talking quickly and easily, while others struggle with their articulation or their vocabulary learning a little more slowly. Working with my two sons with speech delays, we’ve learned a bunch of tricks in our home to help to strength speech muscles and improve vocabulary. We want to share these tips and tricks to help other families when improving speech in toddlers.

What is a Speech and Language Delay?

Basically, a speech and language delay is when your child is meeting communication milestones slower than expected based on the averages of children their age. Your pediatrician will look at all areas of your child’s development and will hopefully alert you if they notice any areas where your child isn’t making the typical progress seen in children the same age.

Looking specifically at speech and language delays, these usually effect your child’s communication. While your child may use fewer words than peers his age or struggle with using specific words to describe objects or be difficult to understand, this does not mean your child has a serious problem. With a little support and assistance, your child could make these gains and catch up to other children their age.

What are the Signs of a Speech and Language Delay?

Speech and language delays cover many different areas of communication so this is a rather large list. However, there are some typical signs to look for when deciding if your child may have a speech and language delay. First, your child has not met the communication developmental milestones for her age. This is a big factor when deciding if a child has a delay. Second, your child might be meeting communication developmental milestones, but meeting these at a slower rate than other same-age children.

Rest assured, speech and language delays are quite common in young children. Based on research from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, 1 in 12 children 3 -17 were diagnosed with a speech and language delay in the last 12 months. For toddlers, the American Academy of Pediatrics recognizes speech and language delays as the most common of the developmental delays with 1 in 5 children under 3 meeting communication milestones at a slower pace than other children their age.

This means that many children have a speech and language delay. Many children with a speech and language delay diagnosed early will improve their speech by the age of 3. For most of these children, they are able to improve their speech with the right support and help.

A Few Key Signs of a Speech and Language Delay

• By 12 months (or 1 year old)
  • Child is making few or no babbling sounds
  • Toddler doesn’t recognize where sounds come from
  • Child doesn’t respond to their own name
  • Your child doesn’t say any recognizable words
• By 18 months (or 1.5 years old)
  • Child cannot follow 1 simple direction
  • Toddler doesn’t use words to name a few common objects
  • Your child is unable to point to a few body parts or common objects
  • Child isn’t saying at least 20 words
• By 24 months (or 2 years old)
  • Child isn’t saying between 50 and 100 words (or more)
  • Toddler doesn’t use 2 word phrases (Give me, mommy go)
  • Other people struggle to understand your child more than half the time

A Word of Caution for Families – When Should you Worry about your Child’s Speech?

Your toddler does not need to struggle with all communication milestones for their age. If you answered yes to just one of the question above for your child’s age, your child may have a speech and language delay. This does not mean that you have done something wrong as a parent. Instead, you have done something amazing! You have recognized that your child is struggling and hopefully will take the first steps to getting your child help early. Remember, always trust your instincts. If you are worried about your child’s communication, please contact your pediatrician or local Early Intervention Service Providers.

Early Intervention is extremely important for helping young children with delays. The sooner you receive support for your child, the quicker your child can begin to “catch-up” to other children. With the right early support, your child’s development path could begin to meet developmental milestones and they may have more positive outcomes later in life (the Center for Disease Control (CDC)).

Tips for Improving Speech in Toddlers

Speaking with your Toddler

First, be sure to expose your little one to lots of verbal communication. Children first grow their listening (receptive) vocabulary before their speaking (expressive) vocabulary. To help children develop their receptive vocabulary, they need to hear lots of language from the adults and older children in their lives.

I spend time singing with my little ones. When they are little, any songs will do. In addition, they do love to hear children’s music too. If you are unsure, try the local library. They usually have CDs you can check out for free. YouTube is another great place to find children’s songs for free. Many of these even come with a fun video for you and your child.

Remember, your child loves your voice! Whether you think you can sing or are completely tone deaf, your child loves to hear you sing.

I also spend lots of time talking. To a stranger, it may seem like I just love talking aloud. But in reality, I tell my little one everything I am doing. I often let her know what is going on when I change her diaper, talk about what we are cooking, or even just talk about what we see around us. The more words your little one hears, the better.

Don’t just stop here! Fingerplays, rhymes, and stories are great too! These introduce lots of new words to your toddler! They also take the pressure off parents by giving us the words to say. Not only do these capture your little one’s attention, but they help build literacy skills too!

Useful Tools for Improving Speech in Toddlers

As parents, we can provide our children many different tools to help when improving speech in toddlers. The best tool is your time and words, but after that, there are a few things you can buy to help your child build their speech muscles.

A Note about Sippy Cups, Straw Cups and Open Cups

Second, be sure to use good sippy cups or even better, transition to an open cup, with your little one. Try to move to straw and open cups as soon as recommend. Open cups are better! One of our speech pathologists explained that most sippy cups delay the development of muscles needed for speech. She recommended the Munchkin Miracle 360 Trainer Cup to help transition to an open cup. Also recommended were using straw cups to help strengthen muscles. Most speech and language therapists recommend transitioning to an open cup (or regular drinking cup) as soon as possible.

Since our children were not quite ready for drinking from an open cup, we did use a combination of 360 cup and straw cups. We use our 360 cup for milk while the straw cups are reserved for water. Straw cups can be most difficult to clean and put back together, so we wanted something that would be easier to rinse with less cleaning. Now I know there are people who do not recommend the 360 cup for a variety of reasons, but until they recommend a better sippy cup for speech and language delays, this is the best one we’ve found.

Whistles for Improving Speech in Toddlers

Third, help your little one develop their muscles needed for speech through play. Another speech therapist recommended using whistles with our little one. She had a variety of whistles that helped him to use his muscles in different ways. We used a standard whistle, a slide whistle, train whistle, kazoo, and siren whistles. Some of these we used more than once but with a smaller airway or larger holes. Each one worked on strengthening the muscles in his mouth and his oral motor planning.

Our therapist set very specific goals for our son. He would try to blow the whistle a set number of times or for a set amount of time. This helps to increase his stamina as well as muscles. She started with sets of 5, slowly increasing to sets of 20 for both whistle amounts and time. However, we either focused on number or length, not both at the same time.

She also worked with him on belly breaths. This helped him to take in the air needed to sustain a breath longer. The more air he took in, the longer and stronger his whistles sounded. He could also make more whistles with his breath. This stamina exercise also helped to build his core and diaphragm muscles. He was then able to take in more breath so he could say more words and he wasn’t as tired from speaking.

Improving Toddler Speech with Bubbles

Bubbles can be another fun way to strengthen speech muscles. Not only do must children delight when playing with bubbles, but they help your child learn to use the muscles of their mouth in different ways that promote speech development. In order to blow a bubble, a child needs to use their lips, tongue, and breath. These can also help to improve your child’s oral motor planning skills which help them to plan out how they move their lips and tongue to say a word or phrase.

This is where you turn the control over to your child. Well, within reason. I still hold the bottle of bubbles, unless we head outdoors and they have a smaller container. But do give up the bubble wand to your little one. Allowing your little one to try to blow the bubbles encourages them to move their mouth muscles to help with speech. Your child will need to think about how to move the parts of their mouth as well as make the movements thus strengthening both oral motor planning and speech muscles.

Moreover, your child will need to take belly breaths to have enough air to blow the bubbles. This will help to strengthen their core, diaphragm, and mouth muscles to assist with speech. Blowing bubbles helps your child to take in more air which leads to longer sentences and less fatigue from speaking. Hopefully this allows your child to have the energy to finish their words and include all the proper sounds for their age.

Seek Outside Assistance when Improving Speech in Toddlers

Fourth, if your little one has any articulation difficulties, be sure that they can hear the sounds. We have taken both our boys for hearing tests to ensure that they do not have any blockages or hearing difficulties. They didn’t. But it is best to rule out hearing loss, ear infections, or other blockages of the ear.

Then we were encouraged to emphasize the sounds that our boys were dropping or mispronouncing. Basically, we made the final sound of words louder and more pronounced. We paid special attention to these sounds to ensure that our boys could hear the sounds of the words by stating them clearly with emphasis. This helped them to begin to use the sounds correctly. In fact, this strategy worked so well, our speech therapist sent home lists of words with the same beginning or ending sound for us to whisper to our child each day.

Finally, seek out the assistance of the early intervention team or local school district if you are worried about your child’s speech. Early intervention is crucial to help children to overcome delays and make strides in their learning. Use the early intervention team if your child is younger than 3 and the school district for once your child turns 3. It is best to start these processes early as they can take some time before evaluations can be set up and services can begin. Learn more about Early Intervention in my post on Starting the Early Intervention Process.

Please comment below to let us know if you have any questions or have found any tips for helping toddlers improve their speech. We’d love to hear from you.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.