My speech therapist advises Hanen inspired approaches which involve a lot of pregnant pauses to give your child the opportunity to speak, without ever pressuring them. My mother-in-law, however, won’t hand over biscuits without a credible attempt to request it politely.
A standoff. Subliminal calculation of grandmotherly intransigence versus grandmotherly generosity. Then she acquiesces. She really tries.
Then, with crumbs still spilling out of her mouth, she is back asking for another one. She doesn’t ask me – she knows I only pay in apple slices.
Category: How to talk so kids will talk
+1 challenge
Cutting up the kids’ food. A little parenting habit that you internalise. Then one day you’re at a work lunch and you only just stop yourself leaning across and offering to slice up your colleague’s chicken.
Here’s another habit that I’ve absorbed – to build up my kids speech. Echo their sentences back adding a word. A therapist taught it to me when Junior was at two word sentence level and we wanted her to move on to three word sentences. I find it works for all stages.
I think it helps gently nudge the kids towards more complicated sentence structures. More than that – it always makes me feel happier in myself – because it is a speech booster that is achievable on even the most stressful days.
I’m setting myself a challenge: echo and add ten times for ten consecutive days. I’ll report back.
