Today I wanted to do an entry related to how we can use language to help alleviate power struggles and frustration your child might have while they are still learning to communicate, while still helping them to strengthen their language skills. A few quick strategies to shift how we ask our children things can really help to give them feelings of control and avoid unnecessary frustration. These tips are geared towards early communicators or even for children who have strong language skills but get easily frustrated by too many questions and verbal demands being given to them.
Strategies:
Give choices between 2 options that you are okay with your child choosing. For example, instead of saying “what do you want for lunch?” Say “do you want noodles or chicken nuggets for lunch?” If your child’s language skills are limited, presenting these two options visually where he/she can point/gesture towards the preferred item is also helpful.
When with your child and trying to get them to talk, try and limit the number of questions you ask them and instead model you using these words. Example: If you’re playing together and your child feeds a doll with a bottle, instead of asking “what is the dolly doing?” You can model “The baby is eating! She is hungry.” Children who are emerging communicators feel less pressure to answer and are more motivated to imitate/copy our words than they do when we ask them to answer questions directly.
With familiar words, you can also try to have your child fill in the blank. In the example with the toy doll above, in addition to modeling, you could say “The dolly is _____…” to see if your child might attempt to fill in the blank with an appropriate word, such as “eating/drinking” in the example above. Wait a second or two to see if he/she responds and if she doesn’t, no problem, you can still model the target word for her.
This is basically a fancy and more eloquent way of saying “playing dumb!” Acting like you don’t understand what your child is trying to express to you non–verbally (via gestures, pointing, etc.) is a great way to elicit language and to also take the pressure off of them communicating because you want them to. When they don’t feel you understand them, they are communicating because they want you to understand their message, not because they are feeling the pressure from you to communicate. Just make sure you don’t take this too far to the point they become frustrated—Just do it once and if they still don’t verbally communicate what they want, you can then act like you all of a sudden get it!
I use these with both my clients as well as my own daughter every day. With my own daughter, who just turned 2 years old, when she is having a hard day, I make sure to try and increase the use of these strategies and decrease the number of questions and verbal requests I make to her. Sure we still have our toddler moments but they certainly help!
That’s all I have for now, thanks for reading!
-Allie-