The Day Nursery Mentioned My Son’s Speech Development
It was a Thursday afternoon, the usual pick-up. I was crouched down helping my son Tom get his coat on when Jo, one of the nursery assistants, came over and crouched beside us. She had that look, the one you see when a practitioner has something to pass on that isn’t bad news exactly, but isn’t nothing either.
“Can I have a quick word?” she said, and I remember thinking, please don’t say he bit someone again.
“Of course,” I said, keeping it light.
“We’ve just been noticing with Tom, around speech,” she said, tilting her head. “He’s such a good communicator, and he understands everything perfectly. But we’re seeing the other two-year-olds starting to put two or three words together, and Tom is mostly still doing single words. Lots of pointing. Lots of sounds. He’s not where we’d expect him to be at this stage.”
I nodded, said okay, thanked her. I remember smiling, saying something like, “He’s a late talker, both my nephews were.” She smiled back and said that’s often the case, and that they just wanted to flag it early. Then we left.
The drive home was quiet. Tom was in the back singing nonsense to himself, perfectly happy. And I was running through everything Jo had said, picking it apart.
That week, I found myself listening to my son differently. I’d sit on the kitchen floor with him while he played with his cars, and I’d count his words when he spoke. He had plenty: “car”, “book”, “duck”, “eat”, “no” — endlessly “no”. But he wasn’t stringing them together. He’d say “car” and point at the wheel, then look at me expectantly. He knew what he wanted to say. I could see it in his face. The words just weren’t coming out in a row.
What kept me from panicking was the other side of it: his understanding. If I asked him to bring his cup to the table, he did it. If I said “the tractor is under the blanket in the living room,” he’d go and get it. He wasn’t struggling to understand language. He was struggling to produce it. And that felt like an important distinction to hold onto.
A couple of weeks later, I called the health visitor and mentioned what the nursery had said. She arranged a telephone chat and then a referral for a speech and language assessment. The waiting list, she said, was around three months. That gave me something practical to do, which helped more than I expected. Worrying was useful, but waiting with a plan was easier.
One thing I found out during that time was that the comments from nursery weren’t about my son being “behind” in a scary way. It was more about them tracking development across a broad picture. They weren’t diagnosing anything. They were letting me know, so that if there was something going on, we’d have a head start. When I thought about it like that, it made sense. They see hundreds of children. I only see mine, and I’d always just assumed he was on his own timeline.
Still, I wanted to do something at home, so I started reading more than usual. A few practical changes made a real difference.
First, I stopped asking him so many questions. I hadn’t noticed I was doing this, but I was constantly asking: “What’s that?” “What colour is it?” “Are you hungry?” And Tom’s answer to most of that was a point or a nod or a shake. The questions weren’t giving him a reason to try words because pointing worked fine.
So instead, I started making comments. Instead of “What’s that?” I’d say, “That’s a big red fire engine. It’s going to the rescue.” He didn’t have to answer, but he was hearing language without the pressure of producing a response. My husband and I also started doing more narrating. “I’m chopping the carrots now.” “Tom’s pushing the train.” It felt a bit odd at first, like I was commentating on our lives, but it just becomes part of the rhythm of the day.
The other thing that worked surprisingly well was the book pause. Every night before bed, Tom and I read the same two or three books. One of them was about a rabbit getting dressed. On each page, he’d put on something different. I’d say, “The rabbit puts on his… ” and pause. Tom would look at me, waiting, and then I’d fill in the word myself. But after a few nights, he started filling it in for me. “Hat!” he’d say, then look thrilled with himself. That became a little ritual, and the fills were often wrong, but that didn’t matter. He was trying.
I also asked about his hearing. It hadn’t occurred to me, but the health visitor mentioned that children who’ve had a few ear infections can sometimes have fluid in their ears that muffles sound. We got him a hearing test at a local clinic. Tom, at two, sat in this little booth while they played sounds through headphones. When he heard a noise, he was meant to do a puzzle piece. He got fixated on the blue piece and pressed it for everything. The audiologist laughed and said his hearing was fine. I actually felt relieved. It wasn’t a hidden ear issue. It was just his own pace.
Around that time, something shifted at home. It’s hard to describe exactly when it happened, but the single words slowly started joining up. First it was “more milk”. Then “daddy car”. The sentences weren’t always clear, and sometimes the grammar was a bit mush, but the combination of words had begun.
I remember one afternoon at the kitchen window, watching the neighbour’s dog in the garden next door. Tom stood on a chair, pressed his nose to the glass, and said, “Big dog running.” It was three words. It was unremarkable. And I nearly started crying into the washing up.
The speech assessment came through around a month later. A lovely woman came to the house with a bag of toys and games. She spent forty minutes playing with Tom while I sat in the corner pretending to look at my phone but actually absorbing everything. Her summary was exactly what I’d started to suspect: his understanding was above average for his age, and his expressive language was on the lower side of the range for a typical two-year-old. She said, quite calmly, that he wasn’t a cause for concern, but that we could have a follow-up in a few months if we wanted. We said yes.
What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that the comment from nursery turned out to be nothing to be afraid of. But it also wasn’t nothing. It made me pay attention. It gave me a reason to change some small things at home that have now just become part of our day. We still do the book pauses. I still make comments instead of asking questions. And Tom still says “no” to almost everything, but he says it in longer sentences now.
I don’t know if he’ll catch up completely by the time he starts school, or if he’ll always be a little quieter than his peers. I think he’ll be fine, but I’m not certain of it. There’s still a follow-up appointment in the diary, months away. And there are moments, still, when I hear other children his age speaking in full sentences at the park, and I feel that little pinch.
But then Tom will look up at the sky on a walk home and say, “Moon coming out soon,” and I’ll remember that a year ago, he was just pointing at the sky and waiting for me to understand. Maybe that’s something. We’re getting there, word by word.
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