Supporting your child’s early language development

About supporting your child’s language development

As parents, you know your child the best! You know what activities they like, what they like to play with and what makes them happy.

By incorporating simple strategies into your everyday home activities you can support your child’s language development.

Important Information

Children learn to communicate in different stages. They may look at what they want, reach for it, point, make a noise or sound, use a symbolic noise (e.g. an animal sound or ‘brum brum’
for a car) before attempting the word. At first, their words may be unclear; the clarity of their talking will develop over time.

Initially the focus is on encouraging your child to communicate more frequently at the level they are at now and gradually encouraging them to do a little more with their communication to help them move to the next stage.   

Name the things your child is interested in using one word or very short phrases, for example “Car! The car is driving!”, emphasising and exaggerating the main words.

You can create opportunities for your child to communicate through:

• Putting items out of reach or in a box but where they can still see them so they need to indicate they need help to get it.
• Giving choices of two items (e.g. at snack time “do you want banana or apple?”).
• Offering a little bit (e.g. food at snack time, waiting before turning the page in a book, pause when singing) and wait for your child to indicate they would like some more / for the activity to continue.

Our handouts and supporting videos, give further information on these strategies and examples of how you can use them at home with your child:

• Supporting children’s language
• Fun with sounds handout
• Let’s talk and play every day
• Creating opportunities handout
• Offering choices