ThreeMoonsAreUp

Regarding your late-talking 15-month-old.

Our oldest son was a late talker. His listening comprehension was seemingly good or even above average, but he just didn’t say many words. Sounds like a similar situation you’re in?

Our pediatrician recommended “early intervention speech therapy”. At the risk of sounding judge-y towards your pediatrician, I think your pediatrician should have recommended it to you too! (But maybe your child needs to be a couple months older…)

Every state is different, but I _think_ all states have an Early Intervention program, and they are heavily subsidized by the state. Maybe free entirely?

Anyway, we signed our son up for these speech therapy sessions per our pediatrician’s recommendation, when our son was maybe 18-20 months old. It was during COVID, so he did them on zoom. Soon enough he was caught up with his milestones.

So maybe give Early Intervention Speech Therapy a try. I think you need a referral from your pediatrician, so ask him/her about it!

P.S. Now as a 5-year old, he is still a very quiet/shy boy, so I suspect even at that young age of 18 months, it was already his personality to just not talk much. Maybe would have progressed fine without speech therapy, but no regrets, speech therapy was a good experience!

lol “gentle parent, gentle parent, gentle parent, lose it!” That is exactly my approach too!

Then I have to explain afterwards that I’m sorry I lost my patience and got frustrated. (But sometimes ask them, “Do you know why I got frustrated?” and they usually know exactly why. My kids are a couple years old though.)

I get anxious about certain kids activities too. The one that comes to mind is arts and crafts, due to the mess. Sensory bins also sound unappealing to me.

My current approach, when my kids tell me they want to do an arts and crafts project (“Dad, can I paint my butterfly house now?”) is to be honest and tell them that I don’t like that kind of activity and they’ll have to wait until mom is available. They actually do seem to understand.

So, are you able to offload some of the problem activities to a partner? (Or daycare or babysitter or relative?)

Full disclosure: I don’t have any official neuro/psych diagnosis. I guess that means I have less justification for saying ‘no’ to these activities…but I don’t really feel bad about it anymore. Just being a parent is hard enough–gotta take care of yourself too!