Stop Chasing Words. Here's What Comes First. Ep 160

Your toddler isn't talking yet — or at least not as much as you think he should be. And every piece of advice you've found tells you to do more or wait it out. 

Neither one is the answer.

There's a sequence to how talking develops. It doesn't start with words — it ends with them. And if nobody's handed you that sequence, you're either frozen or doing everything at once with no idea what's actually moving the needle.

In this episode, Erin walks you through the staircase that leads to talking — from connection at the bottom to words at the top — and gives you a clear, honest way to figure out exactly where your child is standing today.

This is the third episode in the Cluster 1 series. Episode 158 covered serve and return. Episode 159 covered why waiting doesn't work. This one is the payoff: what to actually build, and where to start.

👉🏻 Link to Episode 158 Click Here

🧡 Link to Episode 159 Click Here

Share this with the mom who's been told to relax — and can't shake the feeling that now is the time to pay attention.

📘 FREE GUIDE — The 10 Things That Come Before Talking: CLICK HERE 

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Talking Toddlers | Erin Hyer, M.S. CCC-SLP Early intervention. 

Prevention over remediation. Real information for the first three years.

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DISCLAIMER:

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your pediatrician or a qualified health provider with questions about your child’s development or health. The views shared are based on Erin Hyer’s professional experience and are intended to support informed parenting, not to replace individual consultation or care. Every child and family is unique — please use your discretion and consult trusted professionals when making decisions for your child.

📩 Questions: contact@HyerLearning.com
 🌐 www.HyerLearning.com

Transcript

Erin 0:00

The words are always the last thing to arrive, because they're built on everything underneath. That is how it works, and the science can describe it in remarkable detail now. even in those first few months when your baby can't do much of anything, That's the only time in our human life, in those first three months, that we're completely helpless. But he is already wired with primitive reflexes. He comes into this world, because of Hello and welcome to Talking Toddlers, where I share more than just tips and tricks on how to reduce tantrums or build your toddler's vocabulary. our goal is to develop clarity because in this modern world, it's truly overwhelming. This podcast is about empowering moms to know the difference between fact and fiction, to never give up, to tap into everyday activities so your child stays on track. He's not falling behind, he's thriving through your guidance. We know that true learning starts at home. So let's get started. Here's what most advice gets wrong about your toddler's speech. It starts at the top with words, "Get him talking." But talking is the last thing that develops, not the first. There's an entire foundation underneath it, and if you skip to the words before that foundation is there, you're building on nothing, or at least a really rocky, unstable bottom. We have understood this longer than any medical textbook has been printed. A child doesn't develop in separate compartments, movement over here, speech and language over there, emotion in a different box. No, that's not how it works. It's one system unfolding in a sequence that's interrelated. Movement builds the base for speech. Connection builds the base for language. That order isn't a modern clinical invention. It is the design, and the science just keeps describing it in finer and finer detail. So welcome to Talking Toddlers. I'm Erin, speech-language pathologist with nearly 40 years working with babies and toddlers and the families who love them the most. What I want to give you today isn't another tip. It's the sequence. It's the flow and where to actually start because when you see the order, everything you do next changes. Here's a quick recap because these three weeks build on each other, and I want you to feel like you're in sync with me. I don't want you to feel lost. A couple of weeks ago in episode 158, I shared with you that it's not about you talking more to your child, that if you just narrate your day, then it will all click, and it will show up one day. It's really that back and forth, both verbal and non-verbal. We now refer to it as serve and return, but it's really that connection together. And then last week, in episode 159, I shared how it's not about waiting, that, she'll just talk when she's ready, or all kids learn at their own pace. That's not how it works. Your child is wired to communicate, and the foundation gets built. You don't wait for it just to appear one day. So today is the payoff question. Then if it's not those two things, what do I do? How do I build this, and in what order? And if you have a baby, or perhaps you have a six or a seven-month-old and they're just starting to sit up or you're introducing solids to them, I want you to lean in extra hard today because everything I'm about to walk through, you can start laying the foundation before a single word is even in sight. That's the whole gift about getting ahead of this. We can prevent developmental delays and worry if you understand the process. So here's where you actually get stuck. You're already trying. You wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you weren't trying, if you weren't curious and trying to find a way to do this comfortably and successfully. The problem isn't effort. It's that nobody handed you the map w- to, that pinpoints the starting place. So you go one of two ways. The first ends up in this freeze paralyzed position because you search on the internet and you're handed, you know what, two or 300 different tips that seem to contradict one another, and you are on total overwhelm. Or you swing the other way and you try to do everything. You're throwing everything against the wall hoping that something sticks, right? You use the flashcards or the apps or narrate all day, music class, 27 different things that you must do that somebody on the internet told you. And you burn yourself out chasing all of it in no particular order. You're just trying to do it all with no idea, is this right for my child at this stage with me at home? You don't know. So I wanna take both of those things off the table today because there's a third way, and it's calmer than either one of those. You don't need to do everything. You need to understand which step comes next for your child at this time and where to start, and we'll walk you through that today So here's the cost of not having a map. When nobody hands you the order, you reach for the most obvious thing, words, right? They're tangible, they're countable, they're measurable. So you go straight for them. "Say ball, honey. Say ball. Can you say ball?" But talking isn't the starting point. It's the outcome. It sits on top of everything that you've built underneath, and I'll show you why in a second. But going straight at the words is like stepping on a scale every single morning and focusing on how that number isn't changing. All the while, you're ignoring everything else that is changing. You realize you're carrying your kids easier. You're going up and down the stairs without getting winded. You've got more energy than you did a couple of weeks ago. The scale doesn't capture any of that. You chase and focus on the number, and you miss everything that's growing and developing and moving in the right direction, because that's what the real life is all about. So the same thing happens in speech and language. We chase the word count, and we miss the babbling or the approximated Old MacDonald or the pointing or climbing up on the furniture or perhaps the, the stable feet that you see when he pulls up to a stand and he's trying to walk. All of it is building the structure underneath that one outcome, talking with you. So when we go straight at the words, you're trying to build the roof before the walls are up. You're pushing on the top of the staircase while the bottom steps, the ones actually holding the whole thing up, are still missing or wobbly. That's not a you problem. Nobody showed you the staircase, right? So let me show you how it is laid out. Here is the one idea for today. Talking is not the first step. It's the last one, and it's not the final floor either, but it's, it's that first level, right? You walk up the stairs, and now you're on a new level, and you have words to work with, but getting there, you have to walk up each and every step So I, I often use building a house because houses are built just like brains are built. They're not born already done. They're under construction. You don't start at the roof of your house. You start with the foundation and you build up. You, you have load-bearing walls before the ceiling. Every floor has to hold up solidly before you can build that next one. That's the same way with early development across the board, and not just speech and language, but all of it together. So picture the staircase up to talking. today, I'm not gonna walk you up through each and every step. Just enough so that you can see how they line up and then you begin to understand where are you on these stairs and, and start there. So the bottom step on the staircase is connection. Before a single word, your child has to tune in to the people in his immediate life, Finding your face to be more interesting than the ceiling fan. Wanting to be with you more than anything else in the room. That's the ground floor. Everything else sits on that. So the next step is attention, and that- that's that back and forth, what we refer to nowadays as serve and return, and I talked a lot about this in the previous episode of 158. Can he stay in the moment with you? Can he begin to share this experience? You give him something, a look, a sound, a reach, and you want him to stay in that moment so then he can give it back to you. And are there serving and returning episodes? That's the engine of the whole thing. Then comes the body warming up, right? And you start to see the pointing or the waving, even the shh, shh, shh, shushing, The rocking on all fours. You see the motor skills developing. The rolling and reaching. All of the noise making, the grunts, the squeals, the babbles, the different sounds. That's not nothing, and it's not just play. That's the equipment being turned on. it's wiring the neural connections which support the ability to talk and to listen and to communicate. Your child arrives in this world ready but he's not yet wired up. We need to provide the experiences that connect those connectors and build that wiring system and, and expand his skills to mastery and automaticity. Gestures and sounds always come before words. You cannot skip this step, period. Then comes understanding, and this is the step everybody skims over or honestly I think they just assume, "Oh, yes, he understands everything." what's needed is that your son or daughter must understand long before they can talk. That's just, again, how we are wired. He has to be able to understand before he can produce that speech. So a lot of kids unfortunately seem to understand everything, but actually it's a wobbly step there, and nobody's really caught it because no one is aware enough to peel back the layers and really investigate, Because nine times out of 10, your son or daughter are clever enough to follow the crowd, to, to learn the patterns and the routines of the family, to pick up on social cues and look like he is understanding the spoken language. That's a very different skill. But understanding comes before talking always. And then at the top, last, sitting on all of that, comes the single words, Real words produced on his own, On purpose. Yes, at this stage, they can be approximated words, Ba for ball or tuck for truck. Those are all real words. He is using them with intent. The key here is that your child wants to share something. He wants your attention to get a response, to connect with other people. That's the intention. So when your gut says, "Hmm, something feels off," and yet all the noise out there is saying, "Mm, just give him more time," or, "Just talk to him more," or, "Read more books to him," you can see now why that rarely works. You need to go back to the other steps. You need to look further, deeper, and to make sure all of this is there supporting him. You are often told to stand at the top step while the bottom ones are still kind of under construction. I want to point out here, this is not my preference or philosophy, right? This is just the order of human child development and how it runs in this, this sequence, Non-verbal skills come before verbal skills. The right hemisphere is dominant in those first three years. Understanding comes before speaking, because speaking is more complex. It has held true th- for every typically developing child in every language for as long as anyone has ever been paying attention, honestly. The words are always the last thing to arrive, because they're built on everything underneath. That is how it works, and the science can describe it in remarkable detail now. But even in those first few months when your baby can't do much of anything, That's the only time in our human life, in those first three months, that we're completely helpless. But he is already wired with primitive reflexes. He comes into this world, because of God's beautiful design to help you and him connect and get the ball rolling, He has things like the sucking and the swallow reflex, the gag reflex to protect himself, the rooting so he knows how to eat, the palmer grasp, Even there's a step or a walking reflex. You put up those little babies and their legs start moving, and many parents are like, "Oh my gosh, he wants to walk." No, that's just a reflex. But God put them there to make all of this learning easier, God Designed these reflexes for survival initially, but also to build that foundation for motor control because that's the base. That's those lower steps underneath supporting everything. As your baby's brain matures, l- learns and grows and expands, those reflexes begin to integrate or fade into the background, which allows more intentional voluntary movement, including speech production. So nobody teaches him to mirror your face, You've seen all those videos. You've probably experienced yourself. You stick out your tongue to your little baby, baby who doesn't really know all that much, and he sticks his tongue back out. That's a mirror reflex because it's pumping his brain to have a motor reflex to help start the learning process. What is imitation? How am I gonna learn how to talk? How am I gonna learn how to walk and do all of these things? Well, let me get you started is God's plan, So that's not something that you installed. That is something that he arrived here on planet Earth with, right? To give him a starting point. And I believe the why just as plainly. I think God designed it to work this way. I think He built children to be completely dependent at the start. No words, no way to settle himself, and then He built mothers like you and me to meet that dependence on purpose. He borrows, your child borrows his calmness, his s- state of wellbeing from you because he doesn't have one of his own in the beginning. That's not just biology to me, that's the stewardship we are all responsible for. Science doesn't have to prove that, and I don't think it's supposed to, it's just reconfirming, right? It just keeps describing in finer and finer detail a lot of what our former generations knew instinctually, A design that most of us already believed in long before research really showed up in the papers, right? I spent nearly 40 years watching all of this play out and watching the science and, and just human nature come together And so first in my clinic and now on these coaching calls all over the world, the same questions keep popping up. And the single most common place I find a missing step is never really at the words. That's just really h- obvious to measure, right? I always then look lower and I find that something else is weaker, right? The connection or the ability to sustain attention, that back and forth, or his understanding, Fix the step that's actually wobbly, and then the words have something to stand on. You can think of it that way. Chase the words alone, and you're just pushing up on the roof, right? There's no stability around you. And here's the part I want you to actually take home with. You can let go of some of the pressure you're feeling now, because I know most of you are overwhelmed with the questions and the uncertainty. So many moms I talk to in the clinic over the years, and now even online, are doing all the right things, and I can still hear it in your voice, the uncertainty, the, even the discouragement. Like, what am I doing wrong, And, and it's tugging at you, the, the self-doubt. You don't have to force this or control it. I often compare it to, you know, th- that metaphor where you're tugging on the leaf hoping that the plant will grow more. He was designed to do this, your child, your son or your daughter, and you were designed to raise them. Not perfectly, and none of us do it perfectly, but you have what you need. So I want you just to take a breath and trust that you're building a home full of love and connection that helps support him do what humans have been doing from the beginning, right? To learn through connection, to learn through trial and error, to put it aside and rest and come back to it later. That's the learning process. There's no light switch that you just flip on and it all appears. There's no magic bullet or special program to purchase. And there's no, "He'll talk when he's ready" either. That one is also a big myth and misleading you. And, and I don't want you to hide behind that. I want you to understand how these pieces fit together. H- how he comes into this world ready and open and, and eager to learn, and you can steward and guide and model with him. You're learning on the job at the same time your little one is. That's allowed. That's how it's supposed to be, right? So here's the one move that I wanna give you this week, and notice that it's not, do all of these things before Friday. It's the, the complete opposite of that. This week, you're the detective, not, does he have words and write them down. That's at the stop of the... top of the staircase, right? I want to start at the bottom, and I want you to look at each step as you walk up, and to give yourself and your child time. So no phone, no background noise, just you and your little one and a few toys. Or maybe, you know, you're out in the backyard, pile of rocks and a bucket, water, whatever you want. Or share an apple and talk about, how to cut it up. Just be with him with no real specific agenda. That's exactly what I would do each time I would meet with a child, whether it's for the first time or the 10th time. I would watch them come in. I would, would assess in my mind where were they emotionally or where's their energy? What's their interest, right? I would sit down. I would watch. I would see what he or she is drawn to, and then I would follow their lead. And that's what following a child's lead really means. What are they interested in? And it might be different from what it was yesterday. You're not going to test him. You're gathering information. Where is your child on these steps, and how can I support that? Is the connection there? Does he seek out your face? Does he want to be near you and try to imitate and do the things that you want to do? Is there that back and forth, whether it's verbal or non-verbal, that serve and return? If, if you say something to him or start singing a song, does he respond and want to join in? Are the gestures and sounds, are they coming? Pointing, waving, high five. What about the babbling, the different speech sounds? These don't all show up at once either, They're built over time. They emerge. And so I want you to watch for them at different periods of time during your day, during your week. Does he understand more than he says with no gestures or cues from you? Really just spoken words, Perhaps you put out a few farm animals or you open up a, a big book with just a few pictures on the page and you ask, "Hmm, which one sleeps in the barn?" And you look at him and you smile. No pointing, no hinting, just ask and watch. And give him, you know, five seconds, eight seconds. Sometimes they need to process. And watch for this also, because I think it's the proof that nobody told you to look at. When these lower steps are working, you begin to feel it in your every day long before you hear it in his words, right? He's a little bit more independent. His meltdowns might ease up because he really is understanding more, and he is beginning to understand the, the routine of the day, right? He's curious or contemplative, right? She wants you to do things with her, right? So they're building that connection. That's progress, and that's important to measure before these real words. And I think sometimes even online, parents, I think, are a little taken back when, when I don't just focus on the words. I start asking about their play and their sleep and their eat, and tell me h- how they spend the day and how you guys relate to each other. Because all of that is progress, and all of that is building that foundation underneath. Wherever you find that first wobble, that's your starting line. That's where you begin. You start where your child is, and then you build up from there. Not where the milestone chart says he should be for that age group or not where the neighborhood kid is or where your sister kid was. Where your child is today. You meet him where he is. And you can build each one of these steps together. Spend time together, unrushed time, now I'm gonna do something that I've been preaching over the last several episodes. I don't want to just, fire hose you with material. I am not going to walk you through all of the 10 markers in detail, Uh, because you're probably driving or going for a walk or folding and doing laundry. You, my listeners listen in a, a vari- a variety of different contexts. That would overwhelm you, and an overwhelmed mom, I have learned, doesn't take the next step. You simply close the app and swipe to the next channel because it's too much information. So I did this episode differently. I put all of the 10, these steps in the staircase, I laid it out so you could see exactly where your child is standing, and it's just in a free guide that I've attached in the description down below. It's a map for everything that we just talked about, the 10 things that come before talking. And there is an order, a sequential order, th- but there is always some overlap, And so I want you to stop guessing. I want you to really look at, how do I build this for a strong foundation? So grab it through the link down below in the description So let's just simply tie up these three last episodes. It's not about more words from you. It's not about waiting and giving him his own space to figure it out, It's about building the foundation from the bottom up in an order together, unrushed, unpressured, without a lot of extra noise from the outside. Talking, the speech word count, is the outcome of everything underneath it. So if you missed episode 158, where I talk about the serve and return, or episode 159 on why waiting until he or she is ready doesn't work, the links are also in the description down below. So go catch them when you get a free moment. And over the next few weeks, we're going to climb the staircase together one step at a time, starting with connection, because nothing else stands without it. And I think in our very busy modern lifestyle, we rush this. We overlook this. And, and it's really important that we peel back the layers on this because- Our kids are losing that connection or they're creating a very thin line of connection and it's not sustaining them. So I want you to think about this. You're not behind and you're not alone and now you have a map with a starting place and you have knowledge to understand how to navigate this. So start where your child is, build from the bottom, be in it with him or her, enjoy the moments and I'll see you next week on Talking Toddlers. Thanks for coming God bless. Take care