15 month old with lots of words but all but three inarticulate

[Anonymous]

Totally normal

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. DC is home with a very verbal, narrating American nanny who is unmasked. I’m not at all worried about her receptive communication or vocabulary but am worried a bit about her articulation since she was a preemie. I’m worried her mouth muscles are weak (although she has no other physical delays).

Normal and impressive that she’s trying to say words like underneath.

[Anonymous]

Yes, normal. I just posted in the other thread about this. But at 18 months, my DD could say tree ("twee") and car ("cah") and that's about it. She'd also say mama and dada but there was zero evidence that she understood those were our names. She also called all her meals mamamamama or dadadadada as well as her favorite stuffed animal and the cat. But trees and cars she'd point out and identify.

And it was fine. She got probably 20 more words between 18 and 22 months. And then between 22 and 24, she got like 100 words. Like too many to count. She went from babbling to speaking in sentences in about two months. Apparently this is not that uncommon, and the reason we never freaked out is that our pediatrician told us she'd seen lots of kids who didn't really start talking until right around two, and then it's like a flood. And that was us. We were offered speech services but decided to wait because she did not seem to have any issues forming sounds (she made tons of sounds, just very few words) and she seemed to understand almost everything we said to her -- if we told her to get out a ball, she got out a ball. If I asked where the cat was, she'd go find him. If I told her it was dinner time, she'd walk over to her high chair. So it wasn't a cognition issue and it wasn't a physical issue. My theory is that she just didn't feel she needed to say much until a little later than other kids. No big deal.

If you think speech intervention will help you feel more calm and help your kid, by all means do it -- that's why those services exist and it certainly won't hurt! But I often encounter parents panicked because their kid isn't tracking perfectly with those "X words by X age" trackers and my experience is that those are just approximations and don't tell the full story.

[Anonymous]

Repeat the target word clearly but otherwise don't sweat it too much.

[Anonymous]

DD used to Go on long diatribes at 20 months without one word being understandable! We have her on video scolding her older brother for something, with all the hand gestures and facial expressions and going on and on in her own language! I don’t actually remember when exactly we could understand her!!

She’s a smart girl, in college now, and doing fine.

[Anonymous]

Our DS sounded like Cousin It from The Addams Family.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like my now 6 yo. We’re a trilingual family so I wasn’t worried. Trilingual chatterbox now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our DS sounded like Cousin It from The Addams Family.