Still Not Talking

You were told to wait. Nobody told you what to watch.

Your two-year-old has a handful of words. The milestone checklist in the examination room places 50 words at 30 months. The criterion a speech-language pathologist uses places it at 24 months.

You are standing in the six months between them, and nobody has told you that gap exists.

This book gives you a number instead of a feeling:

• Count. Clinicians assess a toddler's talking by counting words. Parents almost never do. There is a checklist of common first words in the back, and it takes about ten minutes to produce a real number.
• Four moves. Not 101 activities - four specific ways of responding to your child that appear in the clinical literature as the interaction styles that help. Ten minutes a day.
• Twelve weeks, with two checkpoints. Week 4 and week 8 tell you whether to carry on, change something, or escalate - written out, so you are not deciding in the dark.
• How to get an evaluation. Including the route that does not require your doctor to agree, and what to say when you are told to wait again.

Built to be written in: word list pages, a first-words checklist, a twelve-week log.

This book is not a diagnosis and not a replacement for a speech-language pathologist. Every claim presented as established has a source, and the sources are listed at the back.