Can you "train" toddlers?

I’ve seen a few toddlers that seemed rather slow to talk (3+ years). They can talk, but most of the time they seem to prefer to communicate by "uh"s and "ah"s. I wonder if you can “train” them to talk, by not giving them what they want until they ask for it?

Is this an accepted method of bringing up toddlers? Will it cause any harm? What ages is this most effective at (might be used to teach other things as well, e.g. manners)?

Well sure, that’s pretty much how it works. A child learns to talk through a process of feedback. Babies make all sorts of noises from very early on. As involved adults, we respond, feedback and interpret those noises and this starts to shape the baby’s behaviour. Rinse and repeat and eventually the child is talking. I’m not sure it’s conscious ‘training’ but that is what we’re doing with them.

You can hear this in (particularly) mothers’ communication with their infants right from the get-go - the language that some child psychologists call ‘motherese’. Depending on who you believe (and my books are all packed away, or I’d quote you a cite) this is pretty much instinctive communication on the parent’s part. It certainly has common elements in most cultures: it’s soft, of a certain attractive pitch and so on. It also has very strong repetitive and narrative qualities. So you get a lot of ‘oh, you want this do you? You want milk? Here’s your milk? Lovely milk’ etc etc. That way the child leans the association of this sound with this object, and they start (eventually) to make the sound themselves.

With regards to your actual question, I think (unless there is an actual psychological or physiological problem, in which case none of this applies of course) it’s just as likely to be the other way round. You train a child not to bother to talk, by over-interpreting the noises they make - giving them too much leeway for too long. If your 2-3 year old gets what they want by pointing and grunting, then there’s no incentive to do anything else. The feedback loop is skewed and language development is slower than it may be in other cases. I don’t mean to ascribe blame here - I don’t think it’s a deliberate act at all. But as is blindingly obvious to anyone who’s spent any time round small children, as parents (and other involved adults) we have enormous and profound influence on everything they do. Anecdotally you often hear parents say that their second and subsequent children are slower to talk, since they just don’t have to - their older siblings become adept at interpreting the grunts and gestures and the younger gets the results they want.

I’ve always found that one of the most useful ways to think of little children is that they are natural scientists. They’re all about ‘what happens when I do this?’. (As an aside, even if this is total garbage, I find it helps me to keep my sanity and temper as I deal with my delightful and adventurous 2 year old). So, if Bobby notices that to get a book read he needs to find it on the shelf and make a grunty noise, that’s what he does to get his book read. If he is encouraged to make an attempt at the word ‘book’, and his efforts are noticed, repeated back to him and praised and have the result of having his book read to him, that’s what he’ll keep doing. As an adult, if you want your child to use words, you make sure that they use words to get the result they’re after. Making them guess the magic key wouldn’t work, but if you spell out to them: ‘use your words’ - in my house it’s usually ‘use your words like a big girl clone’, but that’s just us - then they make the association. They understand the experiment.

You use exactly the same techniques to shape any behaviour. In my house, you don’t get down from the table until you’ve said thank you for the meal and asked to be excused. We can all sit there in unpleasant silence till then, if that’s what it takes. My littley has to be coached through this, of course, but I say to her ‘Are you finished? Right, “thank you for my tea. Please may I get down?”’. She makes a noise that sounds pretty much like that, and she can get down. She doesn’t make the noises, she sits there till she responds appropriately. It’s all about showing them how to achieve the things they want, so they can learn - if I do x, yis the consequence. So I should start doing x if I want y.

Again, this is absent any actual problem with development.

When our 2-and-a-half year old grunts, my wife will tell him, “Use your words!”, and usually he’ll come up with a phrase which gets his point across (unless he’s cranky and doesn’t even want to try.) You can see him thinking as he tries to find the right words and put them together. I’ve learned to do as my wife does, because such moments have the dual purpose of helping him get what he wants at that moment (or refusing to give it to him, depending!), and also seem to be key moments in his consolidation and internalization of grammar and vocabulary.

In my experience, you can train them about as easily as I imagine training a drunk monkey would be.

My 17 month old has been doing baby sign language since before she was 1, her older sister did her first sign at around 7 months (milk). In the past month or so she’s been adding the word to go with the sign, so can say more, please, milk, ta, down, up etc. so toddlers can totally be trained, and since I know she has a wide vocab I’m starting to encourage her to say the word before she gets something. Pavlov style it normally involves food, but she gets a huge thrill from saying a word and getting a reward and has been very eager to learn new words. Pretty sure that’s training?

TBH, I hear this theory a lot, and I think it’s a bit of a furphy. I’m sure there must be a nice helpful older child out there somewhere “interpreting” for their younger sib, but I never saw any, I just see older sibs zooming around the house at a million miles an hour, knocking over the baby’s porridge with their elbow and treading peanut butter into the carpet.

What is known to be a factor, however is how much parents talk to their children, and what kind of talk it is. And obviously this provides just as good an explanation for the relative lag in younger sibs’ talking skills - the parents are too busy picking porridge out of their hair and wiping up the peanut butter to do nearly as much one-on-one talking.

The other interesting thing about language is that kids don’t start talking primarily to get you to do stuff for them (though they like that too of course). They start talking to tell you about stuff that’s important to them. Like “mama”, “dada”, “cat”, and so on.

There is a place for “don’t give them what they want until they produce some words for it” in training reluctant talkers, but it’s far from the only or primary factor. I say this as someone who did actually have to teach my reluctant and still-doing-speech-therapy third child to talk. It’s about number three, behind “give them your undivided attention” and “show interest in the things they’re interested in.” (or possibly number four, behind “talk slowly enough for them to understand”, but 99% of the time people do do this successfully by instinct)

Yes, you can train them by not giving them what they want until they request it in an intelligible way. However, and I hate to say it, a lot of it depends on the temperament of the child. Some kids can’t be pushed and you don’t want to turn something developmentally-related into a power struggle.

My son is a good example. You push the kid, he digs in his heels. He knew how to read at 3.5, but pretended like he didn’t even know his letters in front of his dad because his dad pushed so hard even though, if I were with him alone, he’d easily read simple words and sentences.

He knew how to use the potty at the same time, but until I sat him down and said, “Look, I’m not asking anymore. Here’s what happens when you go to the potty all the time - preschool, field trips, big boy undies. And here’s what happens when you don’t - you can stay in the class you’re in, which is ok, and we’ll just wait 'til you’re ready. It’s up to you. Just know I love you.” Four days later he was fully potty trained.

So, yes, try to get them to ask. If they absolutely refuse, try not to let it get to the point of complete meltdown. Another thing to keep in mind, the kid needs to go through the thought process, but if his or her vocabulary isn’t entirely up to par, you may need to supply some (not all) of the words.

We had this with potty training, or more specifically, wiping. Kid had no problem sitting to poo, just wouldn’t wipe. Eventually, we pushed, said “no, we’re not doing it for you anymore” and the result was a kid screaming with his pants around his ankles for 20 minutes, until we wiped his stupid butt so we could all get on with our lives.

The positive approach, giving him a “good boy” sticker for wiping his butt gained immediate acceptance, and we didn’t have the power struggle anymore.

You have to feel your way through it, push a little one way, encourage a different way, and see what sticks and what doesn’t.

Yep, it’s not my experience either. If anything, my older daughter makes a point of trying to get her sister to talk to her. In fact, I’d swear that my younger one learnt some words to compete with everyone else in this house.

My daughter is 22 months old and has never really used sign language, but she’s been saying recognisable words for quite a while. Now she will recall and repeat just about any word after only hearing it once or twice. I find it quite mindboggling just how quickly babies pick up vocabulary.

She won’t just say “bird”, like she did at first - if it’s a type of bird she knows then without prompting she’ll say “owl” or “pigeon” or “penguin” or “duck”. She’ll also happily name exactly what food she wants instead if you happen to her the wrong thing. “Do you want some fish?” “No - egg!” (But she is still not walking on her own yet; by contrast to other children of the same age I know who have been walking for a year but still communicate in grunts.)

As for training, in my experience it kind of works. We’ve been teaching her to say “please” and she usually does, although I think she might be a bit too literal-minded: if I say “Can you say ‘please’?” She responds “Yes!”. :rolleyes: She clearly does know that “please” is the magic word, because if she wants something and isn’t getting it, then “please” gets added pretty quickly.

E.g. if she is supposed to be going to sleep in her cot but isn’t keen on the idea she repeats “Up please!” or “Cuddle please!” over and over. Quite hard to resist really…

Yeah, I think it’s not so much can you train them – of course you can, but more like “is training them going to be the best bang for my parenting buck at this point?”

Depending on the kid’s personality, the parents’ skills, and the time available for everyone involved, training around any particular behavior could be anywhere from a quick, easy solution to a long, protracted contest of wills. Even if they eventually have the same result, you need to pick the instances when you are willing to sign up for the latter.

This is a good point. I thought people would find it degrading because that’s also how you train animals, but whether this is the most efficient method may be more applicable.

I like that.

As humans are basically animals with more evolved brains, of course you can.

Of course, with caveats like the others say - you can’t force a child to communicate before they’re ready. But if a baby can get what it wants with a grunt, why would it bother with words? Hell, some adults are like that. :smiley:

In my experience it’s only true for kids with siblings at least four years older than them, old enough to understand what the baby’s trying to communicate and with enough of a gap that they like being the responsible, helpful big brother/sister and may be expected to fill that role. Not that they will do this consistently, of course, being kids themselves.

Purely anecdotal here, but my second son talked for his little sister for a year of more. (There’s a 3-year age gap.) Seriously, Girl 2.0 could talk, quite clearly, and much earlier than her brother had. But her brother made it nearly impossible for her to get a word in edgewise until she was about 2.5 years old (when he started school.) In a sort of opposite situation, my now-3-year-old is really, really verbally advanced - her older siblings are 9+ years her senior, and everyone used the “sing-song” voice, but used language appropriate for their own ages. So Lily tickles her grandparents when she pipes up with things like “Papa, that’s ridiculous!” when her granddad tells her something goofy.

But yes, toddlers can certainly be trained - to talk, to put away toys, use the potty, etc. It’s not easy, nor fun, but it happens daily.

My daughter had a vocabulary of about eighteen words before she was one. I just talked to her all the time, starting when she was still in my uterus. My son, born two and a half years later didn’t talk regularly until he was about two.

And she did translate for him. “He says he wants ________.” I was always astounded that she could understand him. I couldn’t. It didn’t occur to me that this was harmful to him in any way so I didn’t discourage it.

As adults she is very chatty and he is quiet. Perhaps that was their nature from the beginning? I really don’t know. I do know that they are deeply devoted to each other but I’m not sure that this developed early in life.

All through their years at home we played a lot of word games and I think that helped with their vocabularies.

I did learn very rapidly not to get into a power struggle with either of them. It was a lose/lose situation for all involved including Dad when he got home from work. And they are to this day very much their own people about what they are willing to do. Sometimes I’m pleased by that and other times I wish they were more compliant for family convenience sake. Ultimately they are facing a world which they adjust to or resist and at their age the choice is theirs. They seem to handle it well.

Potty training with both was nothing short of a nightmare. At aged three and a half I did the overlyverbose thing with my daughter.

By the time my son was long overdue to comply I had gone back to school and was taking a class in behavior modification. Everyone in the class had to have a quarter’s long project and getting the little dear to use the toilet was mine.

I started with a visit with him to a fantastic pre-school and promised that, “Yes, indeed, all this will be yours if only you deposit the precious offering of life essence in the porcelain bowl.” Then we drew up charts, bought the M&Ms and got down to work.

Honest, I felt like a Skinneresque parent. Not a good feeling at all. But it worked like a charm and how I wished I had known about operant conditioning with my first child.

I think that’s the last time I used it, though. More often I just role-modeled how we did it and spent some time developing pride of family in them.

I started too late to teach neatness. We were too busy stomping around on the prairies and swimming in the lakes, fun, science-y stuff like looking at bugs and weeds. I really regretted that when they were teens. But today they are both very clean and neat human beings. Funny what happens when you don’t get free rent anymore.

All the stuff I worried about when they were little just had a way of resolving itself as they expanded their experiences. I watched some hard lessons being learned but they stuck a lot better than me just telling them how to do it and them ignoring me.

We’re all old enough now for me to see areas when my effort made a difference. Hurray. It was a long wait.

Oh. (I think I rambled. Sry.)

It’s pretty much a constant concern, deciding on which behaviors you are going to tolerate, which ones you want to encourage and which you can live with. No, you cannot wonder around the living room while you eat. Yes, thank you for telling me when you need to go poo-poo. OK, if you really need to have the yellow shirt with BIG flowers to step crying, I’ll go get that one.

Toddlers don’t come with easy to activate behavioral adjustment settings, so you find various ways of attempting to motive them.

For speaking, saying nothing by three is on the rare side, and seems rare enough that experts say the child should be evaluated. Some kids without any problems simply don’t talk until that age (myself included, according to my mother) but there are other issues which would be good to rule out.