My Toddler's First Words: A Step-By-Step Guide to Jump-Start, Track, and Expand Your Toddler's Language / Scanlon, Kimberly

Is your toddler struggling to say his or her first words? Do you encourage your toddler to talk but are met with silence? Are you interested in helping your toddler express him or herself but are unsure how to do it or where to begin?

Practicing speech language pathologist and bestselling author, Kimberly Scanlon, has applied her advanced expertise in speech therapy for toddlers to create the ultimate, easy-to-understand, resource to assist parents in developing an action plan to effectively model, elicit, track, and expand a toddler’s language. My Toddler’s First Words: A Step-By-Step Guide to Jump-Start, Track, and Expand Your Toddler’s Language is a comprehensive yet approachable guide to holistically assist your toddler on his or her language journey.

This is the long-awaited sequel to Kimberly’s best-selling book, My Toddler Talks: Strategies and Activities to Promote Your Toddler’s Language Development. If you have read My Toddler Talks and are looking for more information, more techniques, and a step-by-step approach that goes beyond play routines, then My Toddler’s First Words is for you!

What’s This Book About?

My Toddler’s First Words: How to Jump-Start, Track, and Expand Your Toddler’s Language was written to help readers learn fundamental concepts to jump-start a toddler’s ability to communicate and talk. With expert guidance and specific instructions and numerous examples, you will learn how to appropriately stimulate and catapult your toddler’s communication.

In My Toddler's First Words, you’ll discover:

• Answers to pressing questions like, “Why does our toddler pull us to or hand us things she wants without trying to say the word? How many words should my toddler say? Should I pressure him to say a word?   
  
• Fundamentals of toddler language development to assist you in understanding why toddlers typically do particular things and say certain words before other actions or words
  
• A systematic approach to choosing appropriate target words that may be missing from your child’s vocabulary
  
• Proven speech therapy techniques and numerous real-world examples to encourage language expansion
  
• An interactive 30-Day Workbook to inspire you to establish a regular practice to reflect on your efforts in stimulating your toddler’s language
  

From the Author:

Perhaps you’re a parent and have a toddler who is not yet speaking and this concerns you. I wrote this book to help you help your child find his voice. But not only that, I want you to simultaneously enjoy the language building process and not feel overwhelmed with worries. As parents, we have enough to fret about. I want your little one to find joy in communicating with you and I want you to feel empowered knowing that you’re learning and doing something to make a difference. As they say, knowledge is power.

Fellow speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and other professionals who are coaching parents in clinics or through state-run early-intervention programs have also found My Toddler’s First Words to be extremely useful. They greatly appreciated the cited research to support their own efforts and recommendations. In fact, some even feel this book is so comprehensive that it could be used as reading in a core SLP class like Language Development. Many of my SLP readers also said that the journaling portion was a powerful way to encourage parents to be more mindful of how they implement the strategies. Additionally, they liked that this book made their sessions a bit easier because parents could jot down questions or discuss points they may have otherwise forgotten to ask or mention at their child’s last session.