We often focus on the number of words a child says, but oftentimes parents have the question: ”Is HOW my child is saying this developmentally appropriate?”

On this episode, I welcome Melissa Minney, Speech Language Pathologist and Founder of Raising Little Talkers to discuss:

• The difference between speech and language
• Normal progression of speech sounds in the toddler/preschool years
• Do parents need to correct every word and how do they do it if they do?
• When a parent should be concerned about certain speech sounds

Learn more about the Raising Little Talkers Course at raisinglittletalkers.com or follow Melissa on Instagram and Facebook @raisinglittletalkers

00;00;01;04 – 00;00;25;05

Melissa Minney

Speech is more the physical production of speech sounds so like the way that your tongue and lips and jaw and voice work together to make sounds and parents often describe this as like how their child is pronouncing words, and then language is the words that we understand and say and how we use them to communicate. So an example I love to give is like a toddler might have the word water in their vocabulary, and that is language.

 

00;00;25;07 – 00;00;44;18

Melissa Minney

And let’s say they pronounce that word wawa and that is the speech part of it. 

 

Dr. Mona

Welcome to the Talk podcast. This success is largely due to you and the way you share the podcast with others and leave reviews. So thank you for doing that and please continue to do so. I’m so grateful to have the most amazing guest to guide you in your parenting journey.

 

00;00;44;24 – 00;01;12;16

Dr. Mona

Things about all things newborn, child health, parenting, child development, and parental, mental and physical health. Today’s guest is talking about something in child development. She is Melissa Minney a return guest of mine, and she’s a speech language pathologist and founder of Raising Little Talkers. And we’re discussing normal progression of speech sounds in toddlers and kids. Thank you so much for joining me today, Melissa.

 

00;01;12;18 – 00;01;31;12

Melissa Minney

Yeah, so happy to be here. 

 

Dr. Mona

Well, I’m happy to have you back. I don’t know if you know this, but our other episode about Pre-verbal communication, we recorded that probably a year ago, is actually one of my top ten podcast episodes. So I don’t know if you knew that, but you are definitely a top ten episode, and people were very interested in that.

 

00;01;31;19 – 00;01;53;27

Dr. Mona

And I wanted you to come on to talk about this topic because I get a lot of questions, from followers. For example, my own three year old was not pronouncing words correctly, quote unquote, and saying different letter sounds or different ways for quite some time. And then now he’s learned the proper way of saying these words. So we’re just going to talk about the normal progression of speech sounds.

 

00;01;54;01 – 00;02;15;20

Dr. Mona

But for anyone who’s not familiar with who you are and what raising little talkers is. Tell us more about yourself. 

 

Melissa Minney

Yeah, so I’m a speech language pathologist, and I used to provide speech therapy services for toddlers and their families. But when on maternity leave, when my second baby was born, and then right about the time that I was going to return, to seeing clients, the pandemic hit.

 

00;02;15;20 – 00;02;31;18

Melissa Minney

And so not knowing what the future held, I decided to educate parents through Instagram. And I wanted to give parents just like actionable strategies that are easy to incorporate into what they’re already doing at home, so that they can feel really confident teaching their babies and toddlers to communicate and not feel like another thing is being added to their plate.

 

00;02;31;18 – 00;02;51;20

Melissa Minney

And so that’s how the Raising Little Talkers course was born. And my Instagram and yeah, it’s been a blessing really to it’s and it was an unexpected turn in my career to be online. And I love it so much. 

 

Dr. Mona

Yeah. Same I mean I definitely pivoted towards social media and it is a mostly love relationship with the algorithm and with Instagram.

 

00;02;51;24 – 00;03;11;23

Dr. Mona

But it’s so nice to be able to meet and reach so many more people besides who we were seeing in the offices like imagine. I think you have over 500,000 followers, like being able to reach so many people in this community and with your education, it’s so awesome. So thank you for all that you put out there. Yes, everyone needs to follow her every single talk or so.

 

00;03;11;23 – 00;03;35;29

Dr. Mona

I’ll be linking Instagram handle as well as other resources to my show notes. So talking about normal progression of speech sounds, you know, parents are monitoring how many words a child is saying. But as they begin to speak more, this can shift to the question. A lot of parents have, which I mentioned already. Is it normal if they’re saying a word incorrectly or can’t see certain sounds?

 

00;03;36;04 – 00;04;03;23

Dr. Mona

What do we see in obviously the speech language world about what is normal progression of those sounds? 

 

Melissa Minney

Yeah. Before I touch on that, I just want to because some parents, I think, get confused between the difference between speech and language and especially in the toddler years, it’s really intertwined. So just to give parents like a little easy definition, like speech is more the physical production of speech sounds so like the way that your tongue and lips and jaw and voice work together to make sounds.

 

00;04;03;25 – 00;04;21;27

Melissa Minney

And parents often describe this as like how their child is pronouncing words, and then language is the words that we understand and say and how we use them to communicate. So an example I love to give is like a toddler might have the word water in their vocabulary, and that is language. And let’s say they pronounce that word wawa.

 

00;04;21;28 – 00;04;42;05

Melissa Minney

Then that is the speech part of it. So in a toddler can have challenges in both these areas or just one. And when a toddler is learning both at the same time, like I said, it can kind of be challenging to tease out what’s what. So I will go into what is expected for speech sounds specifically. So most children have acquired most of their speech sounds by the age of five.

 

00;04;42;13 – 00;05;04;00

Melissa Minney

And I’ll give by age three, four and five and six. So by age three, the sounds that most kids can produce are. *speech sounds*. And yeah, I don’t hopefully you can hear those with my back. Oh absolutely. Yeah. Okay good.

 

00;05;04;03 – 00;05;11;28

Melissa Minney

By age four most children are able to produce *speech sounds*.

 

00;05;12;00 – 00;05;33;06

Melissa Minney

And and by age five we typically hear Z and like in the word the. And then the very last sound that usually comes is by age six, which is the sound with no voice like in the word. Thank you. And you know, my daughter is five and half and she says, thank you and thanks for thanks still.

 

00;05;33;06 – 00;05;53;02

Melissa Minney

And that is still considered typical until six. And I always like to tell parents to like these numbers are not like right on your child’s, you know, fourth birthday. They’re going to automatically have these sounds. But it’s like around that time that they will get it. So she’s not saying the sound by age six, which is in June, I’m not going to worry about that.

 

00;05;53;06 – 00;06;09;19

Melissa Minney

I will see what happens in the next couple months before I would talk to her about it. And I like to show parents these numbers of ages, because a lot of times they’ll say, how do you help my child? Say, you know, the R sound and they’re only two. And so I think it’s really helpful for them to know, oh, they’re not supposed to say the R sound yet.

 

00;06;09;19 – 00;06;30;03

Melissa Minney

Some kids do. This doesn’t mean that all kids will get these sounds by these ages, but it just means it’s not really a problem or concern until after these ages. And so some typical error patterns that we see in toddler speech are called phonology processes. And these are rules of when to use a sound in language. And in this case we’re talking about English.

 

00;06;30;05 – 00;06;55;22

Melissa Minney

And so some examples that you may have heard your child say is called final consonant deletion, where the last sound is dropped off of a word. So like ball becomes bar, milk becomes matte. This is considered typical until between the ages of three three and a half, and another one a common one that parents ask me artist fronting, which is where a sound that’s typically produced in the back of the mouth like and gut are produced in the front of the mouth, and often it’s substituted.

 

00;06;55;24 – 00;07;25;03

Melissa Minney

And so car becomes tar and green becomes dene. And these are typical as well. So this is why I typically do not work directly on speech sound production until after a child is three years old. There are definitely cases where I might work on it earlier, but always within the context of language development, because like I said, they’re intertwined and children under three are going to have a hard time kind of sitting there and getting multiple reps with just flashcards or something.

 

00;07;25;03 – 00;07;42;08

Melissa Minney

So you would want to incorporate working on speech sounds in play so that they’re having fun. And so most of these patterns and I can also link you, Mona, to a post that I have that goes through. Yeah, a the majority of them if you want to share that in the notes for people to see. But most of these are resolving by the end of a child’s fourth year.

 

00;07;42;10 – 00;08;02;08

Melissa Minney

There are a few that last until five. A common one I get asked about is cluster reduction, where a child will take a cluster of sounds like the ESP and spoon and simplify it to pwn or frog is flag because they can’t get those two sounds and those often correct by age five. And then just to go over some intelligibility norms.

 

00;08;02;08 – 00;08;27;00

Melissa Minney

So so intelligibility is how well your child is able to be understood by other people. And in general, a two year old is understood about 50% of the time by a parent or caregiver. So someone who’s familiar with their speech and about 25% intelligible to an unknown listener. So someone who’s not familiar with their errors, like if it’s your own child, you might know that when they say poon, they mean spoon.

 

00;08;27;06 – 00;08;48;15

Melissa Minney

And you obviously have the context of like they’re showing you their spoon. And context is really interwoven deeply into intelligibility. So obviously if we listen to someone with no context, we might be like, I have no idea what this child is saying, so use your clues around you to help you figure that out. But obviously, as an adult who is not as familiar with the child’s errors is going to understand them less.

 

00;08;48;18 – 00;09;17;00

Melissa Minney

A three year old is intelligible. Approximately 75% of the time to a known listener, and 50% of the time to an unknown listener, and then by four, they’re typically understood 100% of the time by a known listener. And this is even if they still make some errors, like in the example I gave of my daughter. She says, tanks for thanks, but I know she’s saying things so I understand her, even though she’s still making some errors and by for about 75% intelligible to an unknown listener.

 

00;09;17;02 – 00;09;37;04

Melissa Minney

That was a lot. 

 

Dr. Mona

I love how you broke that down, and especially the last part about the understanding of strangers my mom was visiting, and it’s such a true thing. Like she’s not normally around my son because she doesn’t live near us and me and my husband understand, I would say 90% of what he’s saying. 95. Right? He’s three little over three, three and four months at the time of this reporting.

 

00;09;37;12 – 00;09;54;10

Dr. Mona

But she comes and she’s like, I’m not under like, it’s almost like they’re not speaking the same language. And I have to remind my husband that that’s normal because my husband’s like, how does she not know? Like, this is totally what we know. And I’m like, she’s not around him. Like he could say blah, blah, blah, blah, and we’ll know exactly what that means.

 

00;09;54;10 – 00;10;17;25

Dr. Mona

Like when he was two years old. But it’s like, yeah, my mom is having to kind of get slower and be like, Ryaan, can you say that again? So that I can understand. But it was definitely, nice observation, like you said. And, one of the questions that I often get asked and I had shared, the reason I had this idea of an episode is I had shared a cute video of Ryaan and how he pronounces words.

 

00;10;17;28 – 00;10;40;01

Dr. Mona

Like you said, I’m using the example of poon. Spoon. He would say put like he would put the s at the end. Same thing with spill. He would say pills. Since I posted that video, he no longer says it the incorrect way and now says it like spoon and spill. But a lot of people were asking in the comment section, do I need to correct these words?

 

00;10;40;01 – 00;11;09;29

Dr. Mona

And I’m saying it because some parents just really love the cuteness of the words, and they almost like me and my husband. There are certain words that we know that he’s going to learn. We’re not going to let him become a seven year old who doesn’t say the right word. But is there from a developmental standpoint? Is there a certain age that we should say, I know you think it’s cute, but it’s important to educate and foster the correct way to say that so that it is, you know, more of a long term thing and that we’re not having to make back all this work and stuff like that.

 

00;11;10;01 – 00;11;32;24

Melissa Minney

Sure. I think the solution is to just always repeat back the word the correct way without explicitly saying, like, that’s not how you say it. So if he said, I want prunes, you would say, you want spoons. Here you go. And at a certain age, they’re going to distinguish the difference between what you’re saying. Because like I have an example of my daughter again around four.

 

00;11;32;26 – 00;11;51;26

Melissa Minney

What did she say? I don’t even remember the word honestly. Oh, it was wand. Like a magic wand. She was like, into fairies. She would call it a blond with an elf. Okay. Yeah. And it was really interesting. So let’s say this at age four, you can play dumb and you can say a blond. What’s a blond?

 

00;11;51;29 – 00;12;08;15

Melissa Minney

Because you might actually not know what they’re talking about if you don’t have context. And so that’s okay to say. And then she showed me and I was like, oh, a wand. And I didn’t, you know, prompt her to say, try it again, use your what sound. But I just modeled it for her and was like, oh, you’re talking about your wand.

 

00;12;08;15 – 00;12;27;16

Melissa Minney

And I kind of like, overexaggerated that sound. And she looked at my mouth and she was like, well, on it. Like she was trying to say she still was in the habit of using the L, but she got it. She says wand now, but really for like younger ones, I would just repeat back, yes, what they said, but in the correct context and just change the sound to be correct in your response.

 

00;12;27;16 – 00;12;44;12

Melissa Minney

And eventually they’ll be able to detect the difference if they’re not detecting the difference. And let’s say if you look back at the sound and you know that they can say the sound, but they’re not saying in that like one particular word, it could just be a habit that they’re used to saying, because that’s how they’ve called it for a very long time.

 

00;12;44;12 – 00;13;03;23

Melissa Minney

And if you feel like, okay, they’re going to kindergarten now and someone might not be able to understand them right, then you could maybe talk during play. I would say, just so it’s fun, like in my situation, let’s go play with our wands. Let’s use our what sound wand. Try not to sit and be like, okay, that’s wrong, let’s do it this way.

 

00;13;03;23 – 00;13;32;15

Melissa Minney

You want it to be like positive and fun, as we all usually know, to do with little kids so that we have their buy in. But yeah, I would say maybe by like kindergarten, if it’s a sound that they should have by that age, you could draw more attention to it a little more explicitly. And again, if your child pushes back and it’s not an enjoyable experience or they feel self-conscious, I would drop it immediately because, yeah, if they’re in a public school with it becomes a problem, like they’ll be picked up by the speech therapist.

 

00;13;32;15 – 00;13;47;26

Melissa Minney

We’ll figure that out and maybe help them a little bit within the classroom to see if they can get it. A lot of times I know in public schools they’ll help a child before they really, like, actually sign them up for speech therapy. They’ll kind of see, like, who can I help to, like, avoid getting them into speech therapy because their caseloads are so big.

 

00;13;48;02 – 00;14;03;11

Melissa Minney

So they might, like, pull them out or go into the classroom a couple times and try and help them. And a lot of kids just get it. Yeah, that’s my answer to that, 

 

Dr. Mona

I love that. No, thank you so much. And I you know, you’re right about the like the corrective way, the positive way of correcting them. Like, yes, you want your spoon.

 

00;14;03;14 – 00;14;21;08

Dr. Mona

It’s so funny because Ryaan would say the take you instead of thank you. The teacher. And finally he started saying thank you recently. And it was one of the words that my husband really liked it when he said, like, take you because he thought it was really cute. Yeah. And we know that it’s coming. We know this is important that they progress into these normal professional speech sounds.

 

00;14;21;15 – 00;14;42;00

Dr. Mona

And so then my husband just the story. My husband was like, Ryaan, it’s not thank you. It’s treat you like he was. Yes. He was just teasing him. Yes he was teasing him. And Ryaan’s like no daddy. It’s thank you. Okay. So it was really fun. And I’m like this kid and this kid gets it. And then I was like, obviously this is a, playful thing that my husband was doing.

 

00;14;42;05 – 00;15;02;29

Dr. Mona

And then he turned. He’s like turned to me. He’s like, dang. He’s like, it’s done. I’m like, yep, this is important. You’re like getting bigger and this is awesome. But, yeah, I love this conversation. This is so helpful. 

 

Melissa Minney

I wanted to just add one more thing. Since we’re on that topic, I would say there are maybe some words that, like in families I know, like in my family, my mom used to call our bed a bed by.

 

00;15;03;01 – 00;15;19;19

Melissa Minney

And so like we call it that. And so if there’s like something cute like that that your child says and that you say, like in general, I don’t recommend like saying words cutesy like that, but if it’s something that’s like important to you, either culturally or just like traditional in your family, I would just pronounce it both ways.

 

00;15;19;19 – 00;15;38;13

Melissa Minney

So like we call it a beddy bye, but we also call it a bed. And so my kids know both. They know it’s called a bed. They’re not like calling it beddy bye to strangers. They know that. Like that’s what we call it. When we’re together, we’re getting ready for bed. So I don’t want parents to think that they have to like, you know, be really strict and, like, not use any cute terms that their kids use.

 

00;15;38;19 – 00;15;59;12

Melissa Minney

And I don’t know if you follow there’s a comedian who I love. I think it’s mom. Com New York City mom come and see some of her stuff though. She has a post that I’m actually going to repost so probably before this comes out. But it’s really funny. And she’s talking about she’s like my son who’s six now used to say animals and now he says animals.

 

00;15;59;12 – 00;16;17;14

Melissa Minney

He doesn’t say animals anymore. And she said her four year old said animals and her six year old was like, no, that’s not how you say it. It’s animals. And she was like, don’t let me have this. Let me have this. She’s my last baby. 

 

Dr. Mona

Oh yeah, yeah, that’s that’s exactly. Well, I love that we’re having that because that’s exactly it.

 

00;16;17;14 – 00;16;37;29

Dr. Mona

Like this conversation was birthed because of the desire. And I totally respect that that desire. I’m holding on to the cuteness because, oh my gosh. And their high pitched voice when they say those cute words, like from that video I posted, every word has now been corrected. Except he still calls falafels waffles. And it’s a it’s a real word, waffles.

 

00;16;37;29 – 00;16;52;02

Dr. Mona

But he just can’t say falafel. It’s I mean, it’s a pretty complicated word and it’s just we love it. We’re like, okay, yeah, this is and we’re going to teach and we’re going to say it in a positive way. And he’ll, you know, but it’s like it is a rite of passage that obviously every child will hopefully learn these words.

 

00;16;52;02 – 00;17;10;28

Dr. Mona

And, if not, we’ll kind of briefly touch upon when should a parent be concerned? I know you already alluded to, obviously, the kindergarten comment. You also mentioned that in your practice, you start working at the earliest, like three years of age. Is there anything else that you wanted to clarify or add on when a parent should be concerned about progression of speech sounds?

 

00;17;11;00 – 00;17;30;08

Melissa Minney

Yeah. So speech is pretty complicated. So I’m going to go through some signs that might indicate something. But like on its own it’s not an indicator. Like when we do an evaluation we’re really looking at like a cluster of symptoms. And so I don’t want a parent to look at this and be like, oh my God, you know.

 

00;17;30;08 – 00;17;47;23

Melissa Minney

But if you are concerned, definitely reach out to a local speech pathologist. You can, you know, a lot of them will do consultations and then they can watch a video of your child speaking or you can bring them in and then they could tell you, like, yeah, I recommend an evaluation. Or I’m like, no, this is fine. So that would be my first recommendation for if you are truly concerned.

 

00;17;47;23 – 00;18;08;15

Melissa Minney

But yeah, we would like children to be understandable by kindergarten so that, you know, they can do well academically and socially at school. But here are some for some like younger ages, limited number of speech sounds. So like I would say less than three consonant sounds by 16 months would be concerning and less than five consonant sounds by 24 months.

 

00;18;08;17 – 00;18;28;02

Melissa Minney

So I don’t know if you, you know, remember vowels from school e, I, o, u, and y. So consonants would be all the other sounds, distorted vowels or consonants. So a child is attempting to use the correct vowel, but they’re saying the vowel incorrectly. Or when I say incorrect vowel like distorted, I don’t mean like they just haven’t gotten the e sound yet.

 

00;18;28;02 – 00;18;48;23

Melissa Minney

So like they’re saying ma because the first vowel sound that children typically say is like r and r, and then we get into like more complex one, like e a, things like that. But if a child is saying a vowel like their vowel sounds, sounds, I don’t know another great word to describe it besides distorted. It’s not like any of the vowel sounds we use.

 

00;18;48;23 – 00;19;16;03

Melissa Minney

It’s like something’s off about it. That might be a tip off that something’s going on, because that’s not typical. They have a limited number of consistent words or word approximations they use. So like the majority of words they say might sound different every time they say it, even if in a row. So like for the word fish, a child might say like bish Schiff and set like within a couple of minutes of each other and not you’re not even getting consistency.

 

00;19;16;03 – 00;19;37;20

Melissa Minney

Like if they called a fish fish fine. And they call it bish all the time. Not concerning. But if they say it differently each time, if a child has a sound or a word preference that they use the majority of the time. An example might be like or doh, doh doh for everything that can happen when a child is learning to speak, like in the very early stages.

 

00;19;37;20 – 00;20;05;12

Melissa Minney

But if you see that they have like this primary or like word preference by age two, still that would be a red flag to me, that something’s going on speech wise if they’re stuck using single syllables only. So we know babies babble. Reduplication. Babble. Ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma. So if a child is not putting two syllables together like they’re saying ma for mama or like baba for bottle instead of baba for bottle.

 

00;20;05;14 – 00;20;22;16

Melissa Minney

And at first you might hear single syllables more frequently, but it should be getting the two syllables. And if they’re not, that could be a red flag that something’s going on. And I would like to differentiate that with, like if there’s a longer word like falafel, for example, or butterfly like my son used to call butterflies. Buh. Okay.

 

00;20;22;16 – 00;20;39;28

Melissa Minney

Because like butterfly is very long and difficult. Yeah. Like one offs like that are fine. But I’m talking about across the board if you’re like, well, my child really is only using single syllables, that can be an issue. If a child is trying to imitate you. The word they’re trying to say kind of is like nothing like what you’re trying to say.

 

00;20;39;28 – 00;20;59;06

Melissa Minney

And on top of that, it’s like an atypical speech error. And you might not know this as a parent. So this is where it’s good to include a speech therapist. But like if a child called a dog, a shog, for example, that would be an atypical error because the sound is harder than the sound and we don’t normally see that substitution happen.

 

00;20;59;12 – 00;21;33;29

Melissa Minney

Dogs are usually called da. And so Shug would be atypical. And that might tip me off. Okay, that’s interesting, especially if we’re seeing that a lot with different words. And then the last one I have written down here is just that jargon, which is these long strings of gibberish sounding babbling. If that persists as like the primary communication of a child past the age of two, that is something that to me, interestingly for parents, indicates there might be a language issue present and a lot of parents will think that, oh, you know, my child is actually speaking in sentences, but they’re just unclear.

 

00;21;34;04 – 00;22;01;00

Melissa Minney

We can’t understand the words, but really they’re not using true words. It’s babbling and it’s often because of lack of vocabulary. So when we hear jargon a lot past the age of two could indicate that there’s a language issue going, 

 

Dr. Mona

Do you see, I know we’re not talking about gibberish, but I’m just curious, since you brought it up, do you see children who are speaking amazing go to gibberish randomly for like, attention for no reason when there’s another baby in the house.

 

00;22;01;00 – 00;22;17;24

Dr. Mona

Like I give the example because my son speaks beautiful. Like. I mean, he has a lot of vocabulary. But when we were with another child, like a smaller child, and all of a sudden he’s saying, like, I do that again, and then we’re like, right, oh, like entity. You see that exclusion and gibberish. And that happened for sure.

 

00;22;17;24 – 00;22;37;27

Dr. Mona

Like toddlers. 

 

Melissa Minney

Yeah, yeah. And I would say that’s different from jargon, but that would probably be just him like, you know, doing baby talk. And yeah, maybe when you’re around another baby or even when your next baby’s born, he might start doing some baby ish things to kind of be like the baby and get attention to. My son also speaks very well.

 

00;22;37;27 – 00;22;56;17

Melissa Minney

And obviously he’s three and a half, almost four. He can walk, but he’s starting to like pull his, you know, he takes his like shirt and pulls it down over his legs and like pretends to be a baby crawling around like wants me to pick him up and like, do things for him that he can do. And so I think like, that type of gibberish might fall under that umbrella as well.

 

00;22;56;19 – 00;23;18;19

Melissa Minney

Oh, and also some kids can just be being silly. This is something that I’ve had parents ask me about. 

 

Dr. Mona

I think he does it like a lot with silliness because whenever he’s trying to be like, especially with grandparent, it’s like when the grandparents come around, he’ll just start to do that. We’re like, it’s such an interesting observation because we’re like, right, you know, these how to say the phrases that you’re trying to say, but all of a sudden he’s like, I did it and heard.

 

00;23;18;20 – 00;23;36;21

Dr. Mona

And it’s like he has the inflection, but not the words that are actually accurate that he knows. And then my mother is even like, what’s going on? And I’m like, nah, don’t worry, it’s not. There’s no real that’s there. That’s fine. But yeah, yeah, silliness. And Ryaan is a super silly kid. Like he loves to be silly and playful and make people laugh.

 

00;23;36;21 – 00;23;55;06

Dr. Mona

So I think he because my mother in law will start laughing when he talks like that. And I’m like, okay. Don’t want him to. Yeah, that’s the norm, that we’re doing in here. But, I’m happy you brought up that if this is becoming the norm, especially after two, that’s something that we should address because, you know, obviously, like all that stuff is really important too.

 

00;23;55;07 – 00;24;17;22

Dr. Mona

So. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Go ahead. Awesome. So where can everyone find you in terms of your Instagram site your resources. 

 

Melissa Minney

Yeah. So I’m just raising little talkers on Instagram and my website is raising little talkers.com and I have tons of resources. Check out my highlights on Instagram. I feel like people don’t look at highlights anymore, but I’ve had like tons of stuff in there.

 

00;24;17;25 – 00;24;36;13

Melissa Minney

I know, like I know how to organize all nice. I also in my LinkedIn profile I have free checklist download that tells you what to expect from three months all the way to three years that parents find extremely helpful because a lot of times they’re concerned about stuff and then they’re like, oh, actually, that’s, you know, later developing skill.

 

00;24;36;13 – 00;24;51;26

Melissa Minney

I don’t need to worry about that. Or on the flip side, they’re like, oh, okay, maybe I should get an evaluation or I should check in with, you know, a speech pathologist. So either way, I think that’s a positive to kind of know what the norms are. And then I also have a free workshop for parents where I give some tips and strategies to kind of get your feet wet and start helping your child at home. And that’s also linked in there.

 

00;24;51;26 – 00;25;10;13

Dr. Mona

Awesome. And I am going to be linking all of that to our show notes. And like I said, Melissa was already on the podcast talking about Pre-verbal communication. So definitely you can search my website. If you can’t find that episode, just search Pre-verbal hyphen between Pre-verbal and you’ll get that episode pulled up.

 

00;25;10;13 – 00;25;39;05

Dr. Mona

It was a top ten episode so far on the show, so definitely worth a listen, as was this one. Thanks again for joining me today, Melissa. 

 

Melissa Minney

Yeah, this was fun. Thanks for having me. 

 

Dr. Mona

Thank you and for everyone listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And Melissa, it’s such a pleasure having on the show. If you did love it, make sure you leave a review, call her out, say how much you loved her information, and definitely give her a follow the reviews that you leave the podcast is how the show continues to grow, so thank you and I can’t wait to talk to another guest next time.

 

00;25;39;06 – 00;25;54;26

Dr. Mona

Thank you for tuning in for this week’s episode. As always, please leave a review. Share this episode with a friend. Share it on your social media. Make sure to follow me at PedsDocTalk on Instagram and subscribe to my YouTube channel. PedsDocTalk TV. We’ll talk to you soon.