5 Strategies to Promote Communication in Your Young Child

Curious about simple ways to promote communication in your infant or toddler?In this episode, we speak with Carrie Clark, a pediatric speech-language pathologist and the creator of the website, “Speech and Language Kids.”Carrie offers 5 simple strategies families can implement into their everyday lives to promote communication in young children. These include use of: Sign Language, shorter utterances, parallel and self-talk, expansions, and visual supports.Carrie and Ayelet go into detail about how to use each strategy, discussing specific examples and useful ways to implement each one with a child at different communication levels.Great resources we mentioned in this podcast episode (in order they were mentioned):Carrie’s Sign Language FlashcardsSign Language Dictionary (Lifeprint)Carrie’s e-book “Jump Start Your Late Talker”Carrie’s “late talker” resource page“Let’s Talk: Infant & Toddler Development” facebook groupCarrie’s “Speech Therapy Solution” membership site with ASHA-approved CEU’sConnect With Us:Ayelet: Facebook / Instagram / PinterestCarrie: Website / Facebook / Instagram / PinterestText Transcript of this episodeAyelet: Hi! Today on Learn With Less, I’d like to welcome Carrie Clark, a speech and language pathologist and creator of speechandlanguagekids.com which provides free resources about speech and language skill development for families and speech-language pathologists. Carrie is also a mom of young kids. Carrie, how old are your kids – and welcome, by the way!Carrie: Thank you! I am a mom. I have two kids, my oldest is 3 years old and my youngest just turned one… so, things are always a little bit chaotic at my house, especially because my oldest has sensory processing disorder, and some days are pretty challenging! It’s always a journey!Ayelet: Exactly! I think pretty much anyone could agree to that! Good, so in your career, you’ve worked with clients of all ages. Let’s talk a little bit about those early communicators. So, infants and toddlers who are not yet using verbal language. Can you describe to our listeners a little bit about what that means and what that might look like?Carrie: Sure! Generally, we expect to see our children get their first words between about 12-15 months. So, we’re going to see that first word or two appear during that timeframe. But, a lot of our children just tend to net get those words right away. And it may be a little while before we see that language emerge. Now, this doesn’t mean that they’re not communicating. We have a lot of our infants and toddlers who are really good at letting us know what they need. I’m thinking of my own one-year old right now, and he is quite insistent on his life, and rarely uses an actual word for those things. But he’s able to let you know with his body language or pointing, or grunting, or screaming like a crazy man. So, we often see a lot of this communication happening, but not the language piece – and by that I mean the specific words to accompany those thoughts. So, with our younger kids, sometimes we would call those late talkers,