Helping your child develop language at home may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be stressful and doesn’t need to involve planning specific activities. By simply acknowledging your child’s communicative attempts and responding to them, you are teaching them that communication (whether through vocalizations, signs, gestures, or a combination) is a valuable tool that often results in their wants and needs being fulfilled, which is the ultimate reinforcement. You can supplement their communicative attempts with clear verbal models, reiterating what you think they’re trying to communicate (e.g., “Oh, you want the ball? Here you go!”). Their language skills will continue to develop and refine the more they hear the models for the objects they’re requesting or drawing your attention to, as well as having their communicative attempts acknowledged and responded to. This encourages them to seek out communication partners when they need help, desire something, or are engaging in a joint attention interaction.

Keep it Simple:
It is also important to remember to have fun when interacting with your child and not become hyper-focused on their speech and language. You can incorporate speaking opportunities into your everyday routines as well as when playing with your child. Highlight a few simple words to allow for maximum auditory bombardment of those labels and pair them with gestures when appropriate, to provide more context to aid your child’s understanding (e.g., reach your arms up and say, “Up, up, up!”). Choose salient, high-frequency words, such as nouns (e.g., ball, car, mom, dad), verbs (e.g., go, eat), and prepositions (e.g., up, down, in, on). Try to keep models consistent across toys. For example, when playing with a doll house you might model “ding-dong” and then “Who is it?” every time you open and close the door. This establishes a routine and an expected outcome, meaning that every time they hear “ding dong” they’ll expect it to be followed by “Who is it?” and the door opening for a person, doll, or figure. The activity facilitates the opportunities for language, by providing a potential script without a direct expectation to speak. Overtime your child may begin to participate by asking “Who is it?” or initiate the interaction by pretending to ring a door bell and saying, “ding-dong.”

Use Your Everyday Routines:
Already established routines (e.g., getting dressed, bed time, bath time) can also act as a useful context in which to highlight common, simple words. For example, every time you enter/leave the house or have a toy enter/leave the play scenario model saying hi and bye while waving. This provides repeated exposure within specific contexts, so not only is your child hearing these words more frequently, they’ll also begin to understand and associate them with appropriate contexts. Established routines also offer a great opportunity to provide repetitive verbal labels for objects they see and use every day. When dressing your child, you can label their body parts and clothing without asking for imitation. With repeated exposure, your child may start to try to imitate the labels as you say them. If you don’t label everything every time, that’s okay. This is supposed to be a fun time for you and your child to interact and spend time together; giving them more exposure to language and creating communicative temptations is a bonus.

Communicative Temptations:
Communication temptations are opportunities for your child to participate with gestures, signs, vocalizations, or verbally during an exchange. These opportunities can occur during brief pauses while singing songs or participating in familiar routines. For example, after you have established a routine or song while modeling possible gestures or words to complete the routine/song, pause briefly to give your child an opportunity to fill-in the space with a sign, gesture, vocalization, or word approximation. If your child enjoys rolling balls back-and-forth or driving cars, you can establish a “ready-set-go” routine with these toys and then pause after 3-4 turns to give them the chance to complete the routine (e.g., “Ready-set…”). If they don’t fill-in the space, that’s okay! You can support them by moving their arms/body to produce an appropriate gesture while continuing to model “Gooo!!” Every few turns, pause briefly to give them the opportunity to fill-in the space and begin to establish that some form of communication is expected to continue the routine or song.

Keep it Low Pressure:
While you’re eager for your child to develop their speech and language skills, it is important to remember that you’re their parent and want language to be fun! Try to avoid bombarding your child with questions or so much input that they don’t have an opportunity to respond or attempt imitation. Direct questions such as, “What do you call this?” or “What’s this?” increase communicative pressure which can result in reluctance to communicate, related to not having the speech and language skills necessary to appropriately respond and feeling the pressure within the situation. That being said, you can ask questions that are not direct requests for imitation or labeling (e.g., Do you want water? Where are your socks?). These questions provide the opportunity for verbal and gestural responses without adding pressure for your child to respond in a specific way. Similarly, while you are providing them with language models, provide multiple repetitions and then leave space for him/her to respond with a gesture, vocalization, attempt at imitation, etc. If they don’t respond, continue with your interaction by drawing their attention to something else or introducing a novel way to use a toy they’re already demonstrating interest in.

These are just a few examples of ways that language development can take place during your every day interactions and routines. When in doubt, keep your interaction natural, consistent, low pressure and most importantly fun!