FUNDANEED.es
Know how to “waste” time and don’t expect your child to speak correctly the first time. It takes time.
- Accept with joy (and show it) all your child’s attempts to improve articulation.
- Your child should always be addressed with words of “affection”.
- If your child persists in pronouncing a word incorrectly, do not harass him/her, but remind him/her – by repeating it well – how the word is correctly pronounced. The child should not understand that his or her mispronunciation is taken for granted.
- Things must be named correctly. Do not speak to him in “baby talk”. Do not help to keep him in a degree of affective and linguistic infantilism.
- Do not demand an effort from him that he is not capable of making. Your child should not have feelings of helplessness. The greatest catastrophe that can happen to us is if your child refuses to speak.
- Your child acquires language by seeing things, by touching things.
- Provoke dialogue situations, provoke questions….
- Never use complicated vocabulary or try to hold conversations beyond their capacity.
- Your child has to “create”. You have to make him make an effort and not direct him too much so that he only answers “yes” or “no”.
- Picture books, stories told with words and gestures, nursery rhymes with appropriate rhythm and melody will enrich his vocabulary and give his speech expressiveness and intonation.
- Exercise mouth movements with all kinds of tricks and games: “let’s lick our lips”, “mime games”…. Also with types of feeding that include chewing, proper swallowing…. (he must chew his steak…), chewing gum…
- To develop a correct breathing pattern, you can play many games: “breath-holding contests, blowing whistles, whistle-blowing, blowing papers, blowing balloons, whistling, sniffing all kinds of perfumes, gargling, soap bubbles, drinking through a straw…
- Get them used to educate their hearing: identify voices, sounds…
- Listen to stories, get used to appropriate or relaxing music.
How can parents help?
- Speak slowly, with normal intonation and clear pronunciation.
- Speak clearly and articulately.
- Avoid repeating the child’s slurred words, even if they are funny.
- Use appropriate vocabulary, framed in simple, short sentences.
- Try to answer the child’s questions accurately. Talk to the child about things that interest him/her and can attract his/her attention.
- Include yourself in their games, in a way that encourages dialogue.
- Use “indirect correction”: When it is our turn to respond or continue the conversation, give the child back what he/she said wrong in a correct way without making him/her feel incompetent: E.g. If he/she says: “My head hurts”, we can respond: “Ah, your head hurts, where on your head does it hurt?…”
- Give him/her the opportunity to tell what he/she has done and what he/she thinks, avoiding asking excessive questions and encouraging him/her to speak in non-stressful situations.
- Eliminate questions, interruptions and demands to speak. Questions make it necessary for the child to give an answer, which increases the demands of the communicative situation.
- Interruptions cause breaks in the child’s communication, thus requiring a restart of the child’s utterances, which is an added difficulty.
- Start calmly using “turns”. Respect conversational turns in the family.
- Do not jump the gun and do not finish words or sentences that are difficult for him/her to say.
- Talk to yourself and parallel speech. When we are playing with the child, we should not focus our attention on the child talking continuously. Our emissions should be comments out loud, both to talk about our actions and those of the child at that moment. These comments will ensure that verbal communication takes place without the child feeling obliged to speak, thus reducing the level of demand.
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