My son is now 2 years and 2 months old. He is still babbling and not producing anything intelligible speech-wise. My wife is therefore stressing over this more and more and has even booked him in for an assessment at the hospital next week.
I think the poor kid is doing really well considering he has to learn three languages (I speak to him in English, my wife speaks Chinese and the grandparents speak Taiwanese). He also has to cope with going to kindergarten every day.
Someone also told me that multilingual children take longer to start talking. If this is the case, I would love to hear some first-hand experiences from other parents on here who are raising children in a family where many languages are spoken.
Thanks
It’s such a worry, isn’t it? How can I reassure you? Your son will be fine as long as you spend as much time playing and speaking to him as you can. Your wife’s probably not going to believe this, though, so you may have to waste some time and money with a specialist.
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Can he understand the 3 languages? If so no worries, 2.5yo is just fine.
My child understood 3 languages as well but couldn’t speak, started making simple sentences close to 2 yo, completely fluent in all 3 by 3.5yo.
Unless your child has some speech/hearing problem I see nothing to worry about
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I have two kids. We’re a bilingual family.
My 2.5-yo son can say simple words (no sentences)… but the majority of his vocabulary was developed in recent months. By the time he was your kid’s age, he only knew the word “more” because we forced him to say it if he wanted a second serving.
My 1.5-yo daughter only knows the word “more.” I suspect she’ll learn another word in several months. Her vocabulary is not advancing at all.
We have a friend who has a 2.5-yo bilingual son. Very similar to our 2.5-yo son. Bilingual kids all talk later. This is normal. Your poor kid is on track with three languages!!
Just so you know, the assessment with the hospital will almost certainly conclude that your kid is speech delayed. They’ll only speak to him in Mandarin, which I’m assuming is only 1/3 of the vocabulary he understands. But don’t worry. He’s fine.
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He’ll get there in his own time. I don’t remember when mine started making sense, but I do remember stressing out about it too. It’s silly, in retrospect. As I remember reading at the time, no child fails to learn to talk.
One thing I’ve noticed is that prolonged immersion in one language has a much bigger effect than the day to day mix of languages. Mine went to local kindergarten from 2 or so and his Chinese improved rapidly after that. He could understand me some in English but there were no real sentences until we spent a month in England with my parents, and it made a huge difference. He’s almost 7 now, and his English still improves in leaps and bounds every year while we’re there.
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