Help! My Baby Hasn’t Said Their First Words. Should We See a Speech Therapist?
The 12 month milestone pressure is real, but what goes on in the lead-up is actually more important.
Developmental Milestones: A Range
I love to show my clients this graph I have. It is a timeline starting from 0 months, and going toward 36 months. It has a horizontal bar for every developmental milestone across speech, language, play, self-help skills, physical development, and social-emotional development. What is nice about this chart is how it clearly shows the wide range of acquisition for any individual milestone.
For instance, your child using their own name? It can occur anywhere from 18-24 months; Your child drinking from a cup? It can occur anywhere between 10-15 months. Answering questions? A whole year! (24-36 months). Now this doesn’t mean you should necessarily wait until after these periods to seek support if your intuition is telling you something, but what it does mean is that pressured expectations for things to happen at highly specific times is just unrealistic.
All that said, what I really like about this chart is how it makes visible the otherwise invisible tasks that go into becoming a fully formed human. Because when assessing whether a child could benefit from speech therapy, it is actually more important to pay attention to everything going on before that 12 month “first word milestone”.
Baby’s First Words: The Product of Invisible Brain Work
Your baby’s first words are in the center of a venn diagram that consists of two overlapping circles. Circle one: Things that are most important to your baby. Circle two: Sounds that their speech system is ready to produce. “Mama” and “Dada” often fall in this space for obvious reasons of importance (❤️), but also because /m/, /d/, and “ah” are the least complicated sounds for our mouths to make.
Least complicated, yes but possible without extensive practice? No. From the moment your baby starts using their lungs and mouth they are preparing for speech. When they are putting everything under the sun in their mouth, they are also doing speech work. Your baby’s growing awareness of their environment is helping their brain to realize that there are things in this world that are worthy of attention, and that they have names (!).
Given what we now know about milestones popping-up in a broad age range, the degree to which your baby might need speech support depends on where they are in the “invisible” work of speech development. So let’s shine a light on these unsung milestone heroes of speech development.
The Milestones That Really Matter
I love my graph, and we all love a list. So if you’re at that 12-ish month mark and in a place of worry about your baby’s first words, take a look at this list of pre-communication “invisible” milestones. If your baby has done/is doing most of these things, they are likely on a standard path toward first word acquisition. If you haven’t seen some of these yet, or if they are sporadic, then there is probably something speech therapy can do to help them along. Either way, please know that your child is very young with a brain like a sponge and they will be okay!
Early Communication Milestones
Laughing
Differing cries (e.g., a “hungry” cry vs. a “tired” cry)
Responding to voices
Watching a speaker’s eyes and mouth
Showing active interest in a person or object for increasing periods of time
Looking for objects that fall out of sight
Throwing objects
Enjoying peek-a-boo like games
Pointing to objects
Passing objects to a grown up, or play partner
Enjoying “dump-and-fill” play
Imitating gestures like waving
Babbling chains of consonants “babababa”
Looking, or making sounds when their name is called
Showing understanding of “no”
Beginning to incorporate different sounds into their babble (e.g., k, g, n, w, t, d, f, v, th, s, z, l, r)
Deciding To See A Speech Therapist
If you think your baby is missing some of these pre-communication milestones, or if you’re simply not sure, a good place to start would be a chat with a speech therapist. Speech therapy for what is referred to as “late talking”, is often an incredibly enriching and empowering experience for parents. Supporting little ones with their early communication milestones is largely about helping you, their caregivers. There is much we can do with regard to how we set up a child’s environment, and communicate with them that can get them babbling, pointing, playing and talking.