# Is my child's language normal?
*What is typical in early language development, and how to tell the
difference between development in progress and something worth
watching.*
By Susanne Rice \| Grounded Parenting
Language development is one of the areas parents worry about most, and
one of the areas where worry is most often unnecessary. The range of
what is typical in the early years is enormous, far wider than most
parents realise, and many of the things that cause most concern turn
out, on inspection, to be evidence of development in progress rather
than development going wrong.
This article covers the most common language worries parents bring:
stuttering, vague answers, repetitive questions, and the child who seems
not quite to be tracking the conversation. It explains what is typical,
what is worth monitoring, and what genuinely warrants a conversation
with a specialist.
It is not a diagnostic tool. If your instinct tells you something is
significantly wrong, trust it and seek a professional conversation. But
for most parents, most of the time, what follows will be reassuring.
The range of typical language development is so wide that two
children the same age, both developing entirely normally, can appear
to be at completely different stages. What matters is not whether your
child matches a particular milestone. It is whether they are making
progress, engaging with the world, and communicating, in whatever form
that takes, with the people around them.*
Stuttering and dysfluency
Developmental dysfluency, hesitation, repetition, stumbling over words,
and losing a word mid-sentence, is one of the most common and most
misunderstood features of language development between the ages of two
and five. Childhood-onset stuttering affects around 5 to 8 per cent of
preschool children, and around three-quarters to four-fifths of those
resolve naturally without intervention.
The mechanism behind it is straightforward: the child's brain is
generating ideas, vocabulary, and complex sentence structures faster
than the mouth can reliably produce them. The pipeline is fuller than
the output can manage. What looks and sounds like a stutter is often the
gap between what the child wants to say and what the articulation system
can deliver at that moment.
It fluctuates. Better on some days, more pronounced on others. Worse
when the child is tired, excited, or under pressure. Better when they
are relaxed and unhurried. This fluctuation is not a sign of worsening.
It is the normal pattern of developmental dysfluency.
What to watch for rather than worry about:
Dysfluency that has been present for less than six months and is not
accompanied by physical tension, facial grimacing, avoidance of
speaking, or visible distress in the child is almost always
developmental and will resolve on its own. The most useful approach is
to maintain a relaxed, unhurried conversation: do not finish the child's
sentences, do not draw attention to the dysfluency, and give the child
time to complete their thought without pressure.
When it is worth a conversation with a specialist:
If dysfluency has persisted for more than six months, if it is
accompanied by physical tension or avoidance, if the child is becoming
distressed or reluctant to speak, or if it appears or significantly
worsens after the age of five, a referral to a speech and language
therapist is worth pursuing. Early support, where needed, is
considerably more effective than waiting.
A child of three and a half stutters noticeably on some days. His
parents are worried. But on closer observation, the dysfluency is
almost entirely absent when he is playing and talking about things he
knows well, and most pronounced when he is excited or when he is
trying to tell a story with many parts. His vocabulary is large, his
sentences are complex, and he talks almost constantly. The stuttering
is the gap between how much he wants to say and how quickly he can say
it. It is, in a specific sense, the evidence of how much language he
has.*
Vague answers and memory
Young children are frequently asked questions they genuinely cannot
answer, not because they are being evasive, but because the question
requires a kind of memory retrieval that is still developing.
Episodic memory, the ability to recall specific events, sequences, and
details from the recent past, develops gradually through the early years
and is genuinely limited in children under five. When a three or
four-year-old answers 'I don't know' or 'maybe yes' or 'I think I did'
to a question about what they ate for lunch or whether they went to the
toilet, they are almost always being honest. They cannot reliably
retrieve that information. The answer is not evasion. It is accuracy
about the limits of what they can access.
This can be startling for adults who assume that if something happened,
the child must be able to report it. But episodic memory is not a
recording device, and in young children it is particularly fragile,
particularly for ordinary events that carry no particular emotional
significance. A child will often remember the extraordinary thing, the
trip to the zoo, the birthday party, vividly, and have almost no access
to the sequence of an ordinary Tuesday.
What helps:
Questions that offer context rather than requiring open recall tend to
produce better results. Not 'what did you have for lunch?' but 'did you
have pasta or sandwiches?' Not 'what did you do today?' but 'did you go
outside today?' Specific, concrete, offering something to respond to
rather than requiring the child to generate a narrative from scratch.
Even then, the answer may be approximate. That is not a problem. It is
where episodic memory is at this age.
Questions about things they know
The child who asks, 'what's this?' about a banana, a banana they have
eaten hundreds of times and whose name they know perfectly well, is not
confused. They are doing something considerably more sophisticated.
Language play of this kind, using known words and objects to initiate
conversation, to test social engagement, and to enjoy the ritual of
question-and-answer, is a feature of healthy language development and
healthy attachment. The child who asks about the banana is checking that
you are available, that you will respond, that the connection between
you is working. It is a form of social language that serves relational
purposes rather than informational ones.
It is also, in some children, a feature of the way language is
practised, a kind of linguistic rehearsal where known material is run
through the system to consolidate it. Either way, it is not a concern.
It is communication, doing what communication is for.
When the conversation seems not quite on track
There is a particular kind of language behaviour that worries parents
more than any of the above: the child who asks a question that seems
disconnected from what just happened, or who appears to be having a
slightly different conversation from the one the adult is having, or who
loops back to an earlier topic in a way that feels non-sequential.
In young children, this is very often simply the way developing minds
work, non-linearly, associatively, following a chain of internal
connections that the adult cannot see. The question about whether they
are going home, asked the moment they have just left home, may be
following an internal association rather than expressing genuine spatial
confusion. The apparently random topic change may be a connection that
makes perfect sense from inside the child's experience.
Where this is consistently present, consistently marked, and accompanied
by other features, limited eye contact, reduced responsiveness to the
social context, repetitive language patterns, very restricted interests,
it is worth a conversation with a health visitor or GP. But in
isolation, in a child who is otherwise socially engaged and
communicative, it is almost always typical.
The most important thing to know
Language development is not a race or a checklist. It is an unfolding
that happens in relationship, shaped by the richness of the
conversational environment the child lives in, the responsiveness of the
adults around them, and the particular profile of that individual child.
The child who has been talked with, read to, sung to, and listened to,
whose questions have been taken seriously, whose observations have been
responded to, whose language has been met with genuine interest, is
building linguistic architecture that no milestone table can fully
capture. Trust what you see. Seek support when your instinct tells you
to. And in the meantime, keep talking with them.
The most powerful thing you can do for a child's language is not a
programme or a resource. It is a conversation, unhurried, genuinely
curious, following the child's lead. That is where language lives.*
Language develops in relationship.
Keep the conversation going.
The rest, almost always, follows.
Susanne Rice
Susanne Rice
Registered Childminder · MEd, MRes · EdD Researcher
Founder, Grounded Parenting & Growing Curious Children
Founder, Grounded Parenting & Growing Curious Children
articles, on behaviour change, motivation and bribery, and why children
behave differently in different places, are available at
groundedparenting.co.uk.*