Communicating with toddlers should be child’s play once they start to use language. So why is it that, all too often, we parents find it hard? Self-development guru Richard Templar* has some tips for parents who struggle to connect.
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It’s amazing how fast most small children learn to talk. But it can be frustrating for both your toddler and you when communication isn’t smooth. When this happens, you need to use every strategy available to help things along. Some of these strategies are about how you use language, and some are non-verbal. Put them all together and not only will your understanding of each other increase, but you’ll help their language skills develop too. This is the key to improving your understanding of each other in the long term. Try these eight techniques.
When communication is urgent or frustrating, speak at their level. When they’re relaxed, that’s the time to model the next step.
Follow their lead
When children point and use single words, they’ll understand you best
if you do the same. Once they start to speak in two or three word
sentences, talk back to them in the same way. That way you’re fitting
your communication style to their level. But you also want them to develop
their communication skills, so look for opportunities to talk to them in
slightly longer or more complex sentences so they can learn the next
stage from you. When communication is urgent or frustrating, speak at
their level. When they’re relaxed, that’s the time to model the next
step.
Listen properly
Ideally, you should give toddlers full attention when they’re trying
to communicate. We all know life’s not always like that but aim to
stop what you’re doing to listen whenever you can. And show you’re
listening. Make eye contact (preferably at their level), look warm and
encouraging, and repeat back key words or phrases so they know you’ve
heard them properly: ‘You want some water? Yes of course’.
Watch their body language
If you’re struggling to understand your toddler, look for any clues
you can see beyond the words they’re trying to say. Try to read their
facial expressions – do they look excited, or worried, or frustrated? –
and ask them to give you clues: ‘Can you point at what you want?’
Read to them
Reading builds your toddler’s communication skills in so many ways.
The key is to be interactive. Ask them to point at things in the
picture: ‘Where is the Gruffalo?’ As time goes on, you can make this
more challenging by asking them to show you things that are harder to
spot. Then you can progress to asking them questions: ‘Who is drinking
the milk?’ ‘Which is the blue dog?’ When they’re ready you can start to
ask them about feelings, for example ‘Who looks happy?’ And get things
wrong too so they can correct you: ‘Look at that tiny elephant.’ ‘No
Daddy! It’s a mouse!’ They’ll enjoy that and it will make them laugh.
Don’t correct their language
It’s a normal stage of development for children to use grammar that
seems logical to them, even if it’s not correct: for example, ‘I runned
in the garden’. Correcting them is unnecessary – it may undermine their
confidence and they’ll pick up the idiosyncrasies of the language in
time without any help anyway. You can always repeat back the correct
grammar to them: ‘You ran in the garden?’
Use concrete words
It’s much easier for your child to understand words that signify a
thing they can see or touch. They’ll grasp words like ‘car’, ‘table’ or
‘trousers’ much more easily than abstract concepts like ‘worry’ or
‘thinking’ or ‘time’. So stick to the concrete words until they’re ready
for the abstract ones, and then save those for when you have time to
talk about what they mean.
If your child isn’t making sense to you, encourage them to use different words to help you understand.
Find different phrasing
If your toddler doesn’t seem to understand you, try saying the same
thing again in a different way. So if they hesitate at ‘Time to put the
bricks away’ you can follow this up by saying ‘Let’s put the bricks back
in the box’. When your child is ready, this is also a great way to
teach new words. Put the word in a sentence, and then repeat it using
easier words: ‘It’s hot so eat it cautiously – be careful because it’s
hot’. If your child isn’t making sense to you, encourage them to use
different words to help you understand.
Notice them
I hesitate to say ‘praise them’ because, while praise is important,
it’s also important not to praise too much. Too much praise can
undermine them in the long term as they feel under pressure to keep
behaving in ways that elicit yet more praise. So keep praise in
proportion don’t exclaim that they’re a genius just because they’ve
worked out how to stack a few bricks and mix it with other positive
forms of acknowledgement. However you choose to phrase it, let them know
when they’ve done a good job of communicating with you. That could be a
‘Well done’, or it might be ‘Thank you for explaining that clearly’ or
even ‘I didn’t know you even knew that word.’
*Richard Templar is the author of the global best-selling The Rules of… series. The Rules of Parenting is available in all good bookstores and is published by Pearson.
