What to Do When Your Child Isn’t Talking: Expert Strategies to Help Your Baby or Toddler Talk, Overcome Speech Delay, and Build Language Skills for Life

by Tracey Blake, Tracey Blake

Help your little one overcome childhood speech delay—with expert guidance and simple strategies you can use at home!

For parents of young children, speech milestones are monumental—from baby babble to first words to full sentences. It’s natural to worry when they don’t arrive “on schedule” or when your little one seems to lag behind their peers.

In What to Do When Your Child Isn’t Talking, speech and language therapist Nicola Lathey and journalist Tracey Blake offer parents much-needed reassurance and solutions—at a moment when speech delay and regression is more common than ever. Organized by major milestones from birth to age four, this don’t-panic guide will empower you to:
- Identify early signs of speech delay and possible causes— “glue ear,” tongue tie, suspected autism, or simply your child’s individual pace of learning.
- Help your child practice specific speech sounds and words that they find tricky with fun activities, from classic clapping games to filling a “story sack.”
- Get to the root of toddler tantrums, chronic shyness, unclear speech, stuttering, social anxiety, and other issues stunting your child’s self-expression.
- Communicate better with your child, and watch them thrive!

Publisher’s note: What to Do When Your Child Isn’t Talking is an updated and revised edition of Small Talk.

Genres: Parenting

336 pages, Paperback

Published April 25, 2023

Reviews

[Fallon Whitacre · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very kind, gentle, helpful, and practical book. I wasn’t looking for it but the title caught my eye when I was at our library and I’m so glad it did. Even if you don’t read the whole thing you will find helpful tips just by skimming a few pages. My only wish is that I’d found it sooner but we will be using these strategies for our toddler and any future children.

[Kendra Bowen · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a speech-language pathologist (SLP) with over 20 years of experience, primarily with children ages birth thru five, I am always looking for tools and resources to better equip parents. Because I have a Master’s degree in speech language pathology (communication disorders), I was well equipped as a new mom to help enrich and develop my children's speech and language skills. Not every parent, nor pediatrician, has the benefit of years of training and experience as I had, but this book is an excellent resource for any parent or doctor.

The authors, one being an experienced SLP herself, and the other an editor and mother, have written a book that can help any parent (or pediatrician) understand not only what typical developmental communication milestones are, but also how to help stimulate and grow their child’s speech and language skills. The information is organized in chapters chronologically in development as well as in informative categories, such as what to do if your child has a tongue tie. I feel that any parent can be even better equipped to help their child develop and grow with the tools and information this book provides them. The authors stress the importance of time, attention, modeling and repetition to help any child learn to communicate. I especially appreciate them describing specific songs, games, finger plays, and toy that can be useful speech and language tools to any parent or caregiver.

Thank you, NetGalley, for the chance to read an ARC in exchange for my honest feedback.

[Johanna Sawyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was eye opening and an informative read. I have a Grandson who just turned four and doesn’t speak. He might say ten words. This book is geared toward a toddler but I imagine once we start speech therapy many of the ideas shared will be used to help him.

I feel like we should have acted sooner but with COVID everything has been backed up and staffing issues. This was a great idea for a book but I think my Grandson is more in the autistic spectrum. There were so few chapters on this but I understand this wasn’t a book for diagnosing autism. I did enjoy the ideas it gave to mirror play.

Kudos to the author for sensing a need for this kind of help. I hope there are many children helped from this book!

I received a complimentary copy to read and voluntarily left this review.

[Tina Milledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. It’s a very reassuring book fir parents and offers a plethora of ideas to encourage babbling to talking and communicating and reasons for the ideas.. As a grandparent it gave me play ideas and reassurance that my 20 month old grandson is doing fine with his verbal skills.