do you know what I mean?

My son is 21 months old and doesn’t speak. We had his hear­ing checked and it is fine. We’ve gone to the Speech and Lan­guage Pathol­o­gist and she says that his lan­guage acqui­si­tion is fine but he is sig­nif­i­cantly speech delayed. What this means is that he under­stands most of what we say and points and grunts or signs to get what he wants. He does not say “mama”, “dada”, or “Elmo”. His twin sis­ter says all these things and more. When you com­pare how many words they know they are pretty much on par for recep­tive lan­guage. On expres­sive lan­guage he lags behind just a tiny bit only because we are strug­gling to learn signs at a pace that meets his needs.

The SLP doesn’t want me to teach him signs for every­thing. She thinks that by giv­ing him signs for every­thing we are remov­ing the need for him to express him­self orally. She wants me to teach him the spo­ken word for an item and not the sign so that he will need to use the spo­ken word to get what he wants. I feel con­flicted about this. Once we started teach­ing him signs for things like “cracker”, “apple”,“milk”, “book” he had so many fewer tantrums. It was amaz­ing! So many tantrums were just about him not being under­stood and I’m feel­ing resis­tant on not teach­ing him a sign just see if I can “make” him speak.

I am learn­ing that there is very lit­tle value in try­ing to “make” my kids do cer­tain things. I can’t make them sleep or eat and I’m begin­ning to think that mak­ing them speak needs to be added to the list. I could refuse to give him a book to read unless he says “book” but I see that turn­ing into a bat­tle of wills. While I would love to hear him say “more cracker please” I’m con­tent to repeat the signs and speak the words back to him and keep him stocked in crack­ers and see him gig­gle with glee when he sees that I do under­stand him.

Related posts:

1. out of the mouths of babes
2. say my name
3. more new words