From anecdotes my family has relayed, my sister didn’t talk much at all for a really long time because of me (I’m older than her by 19 months). I would position myself as interpreter and do the talking FOR her, and she was cool with that. She would point at something, and I would tell my mom, “She wants to have a cookie!” My mom tried to shut me up so my sister would be more verbal, but it was futile (I was a miniature motormouth). Eventually she started talking for herself. No harm was done in the long term. She was never developmentally delayed, we both did well in school (I did slightly better verbally than her, which may account for why I talked so much in the first place, but her dedication to music definitely beat out mine). She got her college degree and is a teacher in Texas now. =)
Kids are weird. Especially if siblings are involved. As long as you can tell your kid understands what you’re saying, I wouldn’t worry too much at 2. At 4, it’d be different.
He has and the verdict was that his hearing is normal but that he didn’t respond to the lowest sounds for children his age that they should, however I thought the testing method was a little ridiculous. The ENT first of all gave him a toy he had never seen before and was totally fascinated with(a puzzle cube) to play with while she tested him. He was so intent on the toy he didn’t seem to care about much else.:smack:
While he was doing this she would change settings on a small speaker box and if he turned his head to look she marked it as him hearing it, the sound was reminiscent of cricket song. Problem is we live in a older style home which is open design, burgler bars and no glass on the windows, vent bricks in the walls(bricks with slanted holes for airflow) so we literally have cricket song as a background noise for most of the day and night.:smack: So between him being fascinated with the puzzle cube and ignoring everything else and the testing noise sounding like something he hears almost 24/7 I don’t know how accurate any of it was.
The ENT was private, considered the best in the country, and expensive. So it was pretty much the best we could do aside from going to the USA.
Public school here starts at age two(I think this is ridiculous honestly) and one of the requirements is that your child must talk and be toilet trained. If your child can’t talk they have a class for special students which has kids from anywhere from mildly disabled to profoundly disabled, I don’t think he needs to be saddled with that(I’ve been told we should have been networking and “knowing people” from conception to get him in a good public school) as apparently him not entering school at two has already handicapped him. So I have a lot of my wife’s family and friends basically shocked he can’t talk at two, and feeling that we are foolish for just keeping him home and what are we thinking. Personally what I am thinking is @#&% it we’ll just return to the USA and he will enter kindergarden everytime the draconian rules are brought up.
All the other kids of expats go to pricey private schools that start at age 4-5, it is $$$ but allows us to sidestep the harsh rules of public school.
It sounds like my younger brother, the third child. My parents were worried because he wasn’t talking, and the doctor figured out that my older brother and I could understand what he wanted and get it for him before he had to ask. He told her to get us to stop doing that, and then my younger brother started talking.
I don’t know if you have any other children, or if your child’s situation is anything like this. I wanted to let you know there are all sorts of innocous reasons a kid doesn’t talk.
Yeah, I want to know what country you’re in, too, because that rule about putting non-talking normal 2 year olds (because it IS normal, absent any other issues) into the ‘special’ class sounds ridiculous. I would flat out refuse to my kid in that class - the last thing a reluctant talker needs is to be surrounded by children who have actual delayed speech/verbal/intellectual. Also, 2?! That is SO young to be starting school! Wtf?
I will let you know what I think. I don’t have any kids of my own but I spent a lot of my twenties nannying in London, and the age range was newborn - 4 in general. You said there are no other issues. This isn’t something to be concerned about, imo. As many others have posted, it’s totally routine not to talk at 2, especially for boys.
What I would do in your position is stop all behaviour of mine that could appear to be challenging or escalating to a toddler (and as you will know, they can interpret almost anything as a challenge). Don’t ask him to use his words (especially repeatedly), don’t betray a single ounce of frustration or annoyance if he’s refusing to talk. Just calmly tell him you don’t understand what he needs. Perhaps throw in a ‘concerned but confused’ face. If he tries to pull you to an object, pretend you suddenly have business in another area of the room. Maintain this demeanour. He needs to understand your position as ‘I want to help but I don’t know what you want/am confused by your requests’. Depending on the kid you may be looking at a few tantrums but I never met a toddler who didn’t learn a lesson at lightning speed when it became apparent that NOT learning it led to him/her not having access to something they want. It’s all about creating a situation in which they are forced into a behaviour without letting them know what you’re up to. Done right this tactic is actually empowering, because they feel as if their action is the catalyst when they succeed.
I wouldn’t “worry” either (what good is worrying?) - but I would keep bringing it up with specialists every 6 months or so … in child development, you can go awfully quickly from “wait and see, wait and see” to “Hey, you should have done something about this last year!”
Another thing to be aware of … in Australia at any rate there are a couple of different “sorts” of paediatriciants - general paeds and specialist developmental paeds. And the first sort are not necessarily that good at spotting developmental problems, because they are more trained to spot the signs of actual illness.
The one thing I would check with your son is - does he follow a pointing finger when you point to things, and does he point to things himself if they’re out of reach? If so, that would be a very good sign. I had absolutely NO idea of how crucial this skill is until I got a child that didn’t have it, It’s a building block for Joint Attention - basically, the ability to gain infomation about the world by using other people as a reference to it.
And now, anecdote time - yes, I have known a child who “wouldn’t not couldn’t” except in her case it was only some people. She wouldn’t talk to the building manager at their flats, and she wouldn’t talk to the teacher at music classes (she was four, I used to take her with my daughter). It drove her parents ABSOLUTELY MENTAL - she wasn’t shy, she would even talk to complete strangers, but something about particular situations brought out the “nope” in her.
Eventually they moved away from that building, and the music classes finished, and she never picked any new people/situations to be Not Talking Time so the situation kind of resolved itself. Still nobody has any idea why she wouldn’t talk at that point though. She doesn’t remember.
Some friends had a ten-year-old kid that never uttered a sound in his life. Then one day at dinner he spoke: ‘Soup’s cold.’ My friends looked at him, astonished, and said, 'Did you say something? :eek: ’ The kid said, ‘Soup’s cold.’ His mom said, ‘You haven’t said anything since you were born! Now you say “Soup’s cold”. If you could talk, why haven’t you said anything before?’ The kid shrugged and said, 'Up ‘til now, everything has been all right.’
Trinidad&Tobago, no on the bilingual(cue accent jokes )
Point blank asking my wife what would happen if we just rocked up to public school at age 5 and tried to enter him “well they wouldn’t refuse him, but they’d chuck him into a dunce class in a horrible school” so yea. The schools just operate under a different culture, they recently abolished corporal punishment I think and schools are often religious like Catholic or Hindu and if you don’t arrange it early your child can get stuck in a school that doesn’t match their religion. There is no seperation of religion and government like in the the USA.
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