Help! What Causes a Toddler To Not Speak Any Words!!!!

Hi everyone.

I know a kid who is 2 years, 3 months old and this kid does not speak
any words *yet*. All this kid does is grunt when they want something
or to show you something, etc. This kid appears to be pretty happy
and is adorable. My kid was jabbering up a storm at 6 months old to 1
year and putting words together between 1 to 2 years old. This is all
the information I have and I was wondering if anyone could give me
some suggestions on why a toddler wouldn't speak or jabber any words
at all.

Thanks!

In article ,
(Flower) wrote:

Hi everyone.

I know a kid who is 2 years, 3 months old and this kid does not speak
any words *yet*. All this kid does is grunt when they want something
or to show you something, etc. This kid appears to be pretty happy
and is adorable. My kid was jabbering up a storm at 6 months old to 1
year and putting words together between 1 to 2 years old. This is all
the information I have and I was wondering if anyone could give me
some suggestions on why a toddler wouldn't speak or jabber any words
at all.

Thanks!


Are you entirely sure they don't speak ever? Some kids don't talk
around anyone but their immediate family.

Some kids jabber more, some talk less, some talk early, some talk late:
I have a brother who barely spoke (just mama and one or two other words
like that) well past his second birthday, then took off quite suddenly
-- he now has a graduate degree from Harvard.

That said, if I had a child who had NO spoken language by this age, I'd
probably want them evaluated for hearing loss at a bare minimum.

meh
--
Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care

Flower wrote in :

Hi everyone.

I know a kid who is 2 years, 3 months old and this kid does not speak
any words *yet*. All this kid does is grunt when they want something
or to show you something, etc. This kid appears to be pretty happy
and is adorable. My kid was jabbering up a storm at 6 months old to 1
year and putting words together between 1 to 2 years old. This is all
the information I have and I was wondering if anyone could give me
some suggestions on why a toddler wouldn't speak or jabber any words
at all.

One of my kids would talk without opening their mouth, at this sort of age.
They had the cadence of speech, and you could guess what they were saying,
but they almost hummed everything. FWIW, the speech therapist said she had
never come across anything quite like this: the child wasn't grunting.

Anyway, if the kid really just grunts, it is probably worth consulting
with a pediatician or speech therapist. It might be nothing, or it might be
something.

--
Penny Gaines
UK mum to three

In article ,
dragonlady wrote:
In article ,
(Flower) wrote:
I know a kid who is 2 years, 3 months old and this kid does not speak
any words *yet*. All this kid does is grunt when they want something
or to show you something, etc. This kid appears to be pretty happy
and is adorable. My kid was jabbering up a storm at 6 months old to 1
year and putting words together between 1 to 2 years old. This is all
the information I have and I was wondering if anyone could give me
some suggestions on why a toddler wouldn't speak or jabber any words
at all.

Are you entirely sure they don't speak ever? Some kids don't talk
around anyone but their immediate family.

Some kids jabber more, some talk less, some talk early, some talk late:
I have a brother who barely spoke (just mama and one or two other words
like that) well past his second birthday, then took off quite suddenly
-- he now has a graduate degree from Harvard.

That said, if I had a child who had NO spoken language by this age, I'd
probably want them evaluated for hearing loss at a bare minimum.

I don't know the situation with Flower's child. There are several
possibilities including partial deafness, which could interfere with
language acquisition; delays in acquiring language; delays in acquiring
the fine motor skills for tongue movements; lack of desire to talk;
.... .

Certainly the child should be checked for deafness, since that would
need immediate corrective measures (amplifiers, training in sign, or
something) to ensure that the kid learns language while still young
enough to do so easily. Other possible medical causes may be worth
investigating, but probably only if there is other evidence of a
problem.

One of our neighbors has a son who did not speak much (single words
only) until he was about 3 1/2. He's in second grade now, fairly
bright, and talks up a storm.

My son was talking a lot at 2, but no one could understand him besides
me and his mother. We got him speech therapy before he was 3 (free
from the school district), which help a lot. The evaluation by the
speech therapist was interesting---they gave him simple toys to name
(like "ball"). Because of the particular idiosyncrasies of his
phonemics, some of their tests made him more comprehensible than he
usually was as they used only one-syllable words, and part of his
phonemic system involved omitting everything after the first vowel in
a word. We thought they were going to recommend just waiting
a bit---his language skills were only a little delayed. Then he said
something like "Teh me aba huh wih a a hih heh" which baffled them,
but we could translate immediately as "Tell me about the Wizard of Oz
himself." At that point, they decided that his articulation was way
behind his syntax and vocabulary (which is what had prompted us to
seek help), and decided he was eligible for speech therapy.


--
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
Affiliations for identification only.

Hi everyone.

I know a kid who is 2 years, 3 months old and this kid does not speak
any words *yet*. All this kid does is grunt when they want something
or to show you something, etc. This kid appears to be pretty happy
and is adorable. My kid was jabbering up a storm at 6 months old to 1
year and putting words together between 1 to 2 years old. This is all
the information I have and I was wondering if anyone could give me
some suggestions on why a toddler wouldn't speak or jabber any words
at all.

Thanks!

There could be any number of reasons why the child is not speaking --
or no reason at all. If the child is in the US, s/he can be evaluated
through the Early Intervention Program without cost to the parents.
If required, Early Intervention also provides services, such as speech
and language therapy. Do a web search on "Early Intervention" and the
state in which the child is located for more information.

Barbara

This thread reminded me of a joke I had heard.

Parents of a young boy were very concerned because he wouldn't not speak.
It wasn't that he could not speak. He would not. From a young age, they
took him to specialists. Extensive tests were run. The results were always
the same. "He'll talk to you when he's ready. There's nothing wrong with
him."

This went on for years. Then, on his sixteenth birthday, his mother made a
special dinner for the family. It was a new recipe, something she had never
tried before. After just one bite, the "birthday boy" threw down his fork
and said, "Egad, mother, what is this swill? Are you trying to poison us
all?!"

The parents sat, agape. Finally, the father exclaimed, "Son...you spoke!"

The boy said, "Well, everything was just fine until now."

Best,
Ann

Penny Gaines wrote in message ...
Flower wrote in :

Hi everyone.

I know a kid who is 2 years, 3 months old and this kid does not speak
any words *yet*. All this kid does is grunt when they want something
or to show you something, etc. This kid appears to be pretty happy
and is adorable. My kid was jabbering up a storm at 6 months old to 1
year and putting words together between 1 to 2 years old. This is all
the information I have and I was wondering if anyone could give me
some suggestions on why a toddler wouldn't speak or jabber any words
at all.

One of my kids would talk without opening their mouth, at this sort of age.
They had the cadence of speech, and you could guess what they were saying,
but they almost hummed everything. FWIW, the speech therapist said she had
never come across anything quite like this: the child wasn't grunting.

Anyway, if the kid really just grunts, it is probably worth consulting
with a pediatician or speech therapist. It might be nothing, or it might be
something.


Thanks for replying everyone. This child is very happy and very
outgoing and appears to "try" to say things when they are playing or
wanting something, etc. Also, there appears to be no hearing loss and
appears to hear just fine when spoken to or in response to different
noises.

Anyway, maybe everything's ok. Thanks again.
Flower

Just another data point...

When I was a kid, our next door neighbors had 6 children. The youngest child
did not speak until she was 6 years old. She was tested for hearing loss, even
had psychological testing (I didn't know this at the time of course, but was
told later). All was OK except the speaking. I believe she went through part
of kindergarten with no or very little speech.

Then, she started speaking just fine and it was forgotten. She was always a
quiet person, but none the worse for the years of silence.

She is now a very successful college professor.

Our neighborhood joke was that she was just gathering her thoughts... Our
family always wondered, too, if perhaps the youngest of 6 didn't need to say
much -- she had 5 older siblings anticipating her every need.

-Dawn
Mom to Henry, 11

(Flower) wrote:

Hi everyone.

I know a kid who is 2 years, 3 months old and this kid does not speak
any words *yet*. All this kid does is grunt when they want something
or to show you something, etc. This kid appears to be pretty happy
and is adorable. My kid was jabbering up a storm at 6 months old to 1
year and putting words together between 1 to 2 years old. This is all
the information I have and I was wondering if anyone could give me
some suggestions on why a toddler wouldn't speak or jabber any words
at all.

Kids are different.

I had one who sucked a paci all the time and in order to keep it in
her mouth she just grunted and pointed. Her sister would then
translate (she want's some milk). Once she started talking you
couldn't shut her up.

If this isn't your own kid, then I'd MYOB .


grandma Rosalie

"Flower" wrote:
Hi everyone.

I know a kid who is 2 years, 3 months old and this kid does not speak
any words *yet*. All this kid does is grunt when they want something
or to show you something, etc. This kid appears to be pretty happy
and is adorable. My kid was jabbering up a storm at 6 months old to 1
year and putting words together between 1 to 2 years old. This is all
the information I have and I was wondering if anyone could give me
some suggestions on why a toddler wouldn't speak or jabber any words
at all.

Thanks!

Well, several people here have been dismissive about this, but I'm glad I
listened to my pediatrician, and had my daughter checked by a speech
pathologist when she hadn't started saying any words by age 2 1/2. Turned
out she had something called "verbal apraxia," in which she had no trouble
reproducing _sounds_, but had some neurological glictch that interefered
with her ability to connect them to meanings. (For example, she had no
trouble pronouncing the syllable "ma," bit if I asked her to say "mama,"
she'd just cry.) In her case, all it took was using some techniques to get
her to use speech (she'd developed a rather elaborate set of hand signals to
communicate, including one for "fruit cocktail") and within a couple of
months she was jabbering away with the best of 'em. But if apraxia goes
untreated, I understand that it's much harder to correct later on.

Peggy

--
WWSD ***** What Would Samwise Do?