Childrens communication skills

Jane10, I agree. We are signing now and I have just ordered some picture cards to help DGS connect the language with the concept which is where we seem to have an additional problem. When he was young, he did mimic words but has now regressed.

My dgs is not yet three years old and already he can count beyond twelve. He knows all the colours there are.

My Dd is always pointing out things if interest to him and he picks stuff up very quickly. When we go up and down stairs, we always count them. He just loves learning new things.

A pity a lot of parents don’t do the same instead of always having their heads over their phones.
In my opinion, learning starts at home, long before they start school.

Have you heard some of the parents these days? Most cannot enunciate or pronounce their words and are unable to string a sentence together. Is it any wonder their kids speak gobbledygook? Nah, yeh, nuffink, ger off, come 'ere, waugher (water) ......not to mention the swear words every other word!

One of ours has speech delay. His Mum is very worried about being judged. The family worked hard to help their child with professional advice and recommended activities Things are not always what they seem, please don’t be too quick to judge.

You obviously have the experience to recognise when something isn't quite right ican and I didn't mean to sound flippant by comparing my GD.

Reading your post again though.... At a very similar time we recognised that our GD, whilst very slow to talk (sense) had the most amazing sense of humour too. She obviously knew she was funny and often laughed at her own antics. Her giggles and chitchat were so infectious.

Looking an an old video where she made no sense at the time..... it suddenly all fit into place and made perfect sense, albeit 7 years too late.

The film shows her aged about 3, dressed in a little nightie, with a pair of wings on her back wearing knee and arm pads belonging to her older sister who was learning to ride a bike at the time. We lived in a partially furnished rented flat at the time which was very overcrowded with their stuff and some of ours (we were waiting for a chain to complete so were forced to move out) . Getting around the sitting room was difficult for us never mind the children as it was very crowded and watching the video again and listening to what I think she was trying to say, together with the wings, knee and arm pads it all makes perfect sense. What a clever little girl she was.

My DGS used to chat away earnestly with perfect intonation what sounded like Martian but could be untangled easily enough once we understood the sound substitutions. His raucous singing was especially funny - he used to sound like an old glaswegian drunk. He's fine now though.

gillybob please don't think I thought you were being flippant and I could be completely off base. Believe me I want to be so every story I hear which tells me different is music to my ears. ?

The very real and complex issues which are involved in communication are only just being recognised and still can be badly diagnosed. A friend's daughter was consistently described as having speech and language difficulties and was treated by many speech therapists but has now been diagnosed as autistic something unrecognised because it is rarer in girls.

Children develop at different rates, and in different ways. Nurseries provide a different kind of support to parents/children, not as much one-to-one but so much more peer interaction. Sadly not all the staff are particularly well trained, and those who have qualifications may not have been that articulate themselves in the first place. (Letting parents know there may be a problem early can cause problems in itself - first-time parents don't need any more encouragement to compare their child with others)
And technology is not always a force for bad. FaceTime is brilliant for grandparents, non-resident parent etc, and toddlers are technology savvy at 18months

I don't know where you got the impression Eleothan that the Scandinavian countries have a lesser problem with children starting school with insufficient language skills, but the article, documentary or whatever was, to put it bluntly, lying.

We have the same problems, due to over-crowded nurseries and kindergartens, immigrant children, whose parents are learning a new language and don't speak it with their children, or 2nd and 3rd generations of immigrants who have two half-languages instead of two or even just one full language. Some children have reasonable language skills, but have never not been the centre of attention, so they don't work well as part of a group.

And I am not racist: we also have a lot of immigrant families who send fully bilingual children to school, but no-one ever talks about them, and plenty of Danish or other Scandinavian families with next to no communications skills.

Mobile phones are probably part of the problem, but young parents today have by and large absolutely no experience of looking after children before they have their own - we had helped bring up younger siblings and cousins, they haven't.

grandtante you reminded me of a dear friend from uni who became a mother at thirty.

The first time she had ever held a baby was her daughter, in the labour ward.

The firstbtime she had ever had any child under 10 in her care was her daughter, when they were discharged from tje maternity unit.

She felt totally overwhelmed. I always remember how upset and frightened she was - she wanted to parent but she just felt overwhelmed by the stuff she didn’t know.

That's not a rare situation at all muffinthemoo!

I feel disloyal saying this but it's true. My son and wife are both constantly looking at their phones. My son in particular goes into a zone and doesn't hear anyone when you speak to him if he's reading his phone messages etc. The other day he told off my 6 yr old GD for not responding to him when he arrived home from work while she was watching a cartoon on their Ipad. She cried, he was annoyed, i cldnt say anything. Kettle - black?

My boys seem to have married childcare workers so their wives have no excuse of not having experience of young children. I have found this to be a double edged sword. They think they know everything but more often than not, parents have done quite a lot of the work before the babies even get to the nursery and my sons are shot down in flames because they aren't qualified. It drives me mad but I have to keep my mouth shut.

trisher wrote:
"autistic something unrecognised because it is rarer in girls."
Which also applies to language and reading development ie girls become verbal earlier than boys.
Not sure if it still applies. Here's an example of research:
www.speechbuddy.com/blog/speech-disorders/delayed-speech-in-boys/

My son had a speech problem and I was told that a great many boys have this problem as they develop their hand skills well before their speech skills. It would seem girls do it the other way around. Anyway, this seemed very true in my sons case as he was a dap hand with a screwdriver at just gone 2. He had speech therapy before he went to school and this helped a great deal.

My mum was a health visitor and I remember her telling me that one young mum told her there was no point in talking to her baby as he couldn't talk yet! She did work hard to explain the mother's role in language development but the level of ignorance is worrying.

Some other countries - notably in Scandinavia, provide much better support for families, and employment is more flexible. I think some of today's British parents are just exhausted trying to hold it all together - plus there is a relentless focus on buying stuff.

One big difference I noticed in Swedish nurseries was the focus on oral language until the age of 6. There was a philosophy that if children couldn't speak well they would not become good readers. So instead of trying to teach kids to read words that they didn't understand they focussed on developing speaking so that reading became easier.

grandtanteJE65 - Denmark has always been an outlier hasn't it? Danish children read fluently later than other Nordic nations because of the lack of correlation between written and spoken language - in particular the oral tradition of "swallowing" the second half of words. It makes it impossible to decode (especially for immigrant children) as the way you would say it bears little relation to the way it is written.

Someone I know was worried about her daughters speech as she was due to start school proper, and she was impossible to understand.
The school told her not to worry at all, as a lot of children were the same.

I travelled into town on the bus today. There were four lots of grandparents, all talking to their grandchildren.
There were two mums with prams, both on their phones, ignoring the children. It is a rarity to see mums talking to their children in prams or buggies. I am sure this is significant,

This is specifically to thank NemosMum for that kind and helpful post. I did try to reply privately but there's no evidence that my message was sent so I'm just making doubly sure. I will certainly pursue your advice without delay. Thank you so much. Your effort is greatly appreciated.

Jane10, I recognise the 'old Glaswegian drunk' singing reference - my DGS at 20 months is the same - how can they get their voice so low?! Also, he says a few words with an Australian accent and a few others with an Irish accent - we're intrigued ?

He's never watched television or videos so whatever is causing these strange accents, it's not that!

I do sometimes feel for today’s mums, we seem to judge them so quickly.

My own dil phoned me rather upset a couple of weeks ago, she had been in the park with my dgs, and an ‘interfering old bat’ as she called her (I wouldn’t have been so kind), had said to her husband, but loudly enough for my dil to hear ‘look at her, sitting on her phone, completely ignoring that baby. They shouldn’t be allowed kids’. Dgs was asleep, dil had popped him in his pram at nap time so she could enjoy a little bit of the sunshine.

She has also been criticised because dgs wasn’t wearing a sun hat (I was with her, he’d thrown it out of the pram into an ice cream that had been dropped on the floor). My personal favourite was when a friend of mine asked was I ‘really ok with my dgs being allowed to drink Diet Coke?’ She’d seen him with a bottle in town. He was 5 months old at the time, and obsessed with bottles. Dil used to often give him her empty one to play with if he became restless when they were out and about.

A 30 second, 2 minute, 5 minute or even 30 minute observation if just a tiny portion of the day, yet people seem to think they can make a credible assessment of parenting based on that. I don’t remember even been judged like that when I was rasing my son. It’s as if a lot people now are almost looking for proof that the current generation of parents aren’t as good as we were.