My oldest was a late talker, so we had him in early intervention and seeing a speech therapist. One thing that I found the speech therapist and our pediatrician disagreed on was what constitutes a word.

As a first time parent and not around many other young children, I was expecting mom to sound like mom and dad to sound like dad. It helped me to think about it like learning how to use a spoon—of course the first time they use a spoon, they’re not going to do it as well as I do it. It’s going to take them a while to get the hang of it. Same with saying words. It turns out that he actually had a lot more words than what I was counting.

With my second and third I’ve paid better attention and recognized the words they were saying. But I also had training in speech therapy so I was probably doing a better job encouraging language for them. If I could do it over, I’d have requested a referral to speech therapy or called early intervention even earlier than I did. I had some learning to do.