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Parents play an important role in the development of their child’s communication and speech.

They can contribute to the strengthening of language skills, as through play and daily routines they provide rich language stimuli, creating opportunities for learning and interaction between parent and child. A basic prerequisite for the development of speech is the development of pre-linguistic skills. These skills concern attention, turn-taking, eye contact, imitation, understanding and symbolic play. There are strategies that parents can use and facilitate the cultivation of pre-linguistic and language skills.

• Listen! Look!: Many times a child cannot concentrate on an activity or on a word/concept that we want them to learn. For this reason, we try to attract the child’s attention and deliberately direct him to listen to sounds and words.
• Repetition: Children learn through repetition. It is important for children to hear key words that are repeated. For example, ball! Ball! Look at the ball! I throw the ball! Ball!
• Aural bombardment: “Aural bombardment” provides countless opportunities for the child to hear sounds and language. In order for the child to recognize and understand the sound/word, he must hear it several times and in different environments. At home and on walks, we constantly focus the child’s attention on sounds and words and expose the child to all linguistic stimuli.
• Eye contact – Melodious voice: We maintain eye contact, sit close to the child, at his height and speak in a normal voice, pausing and emphasizing key words in the sentence. It is very important to use a “melodic voice” and to emphasize the suprasegmental elements of speech, which are the pitch of the voice, duration and intensity. We use short sentences, with repetition and emphasis.
• Daily routines – I describe what I do: While the child is awake, it is necessary to create learning opportunities through daily routines such as dressing, changing diapers, bathing, eating, reading books, playing, cooking and walks. During daily routines we describe what we do, what we feel and what we think. We use short sentences, emphasize key words, emphasizing with emphasis (acoustic emphasis), repeat and learn the functional use of objects. For example, at mealtime:
  « glass! I drink I drink water ».
• Pause and wait for a response: When the child produces a sound, it is necessary to listen to the sounds he makes, wait for him to finish and then repeat these sounds by adding new ones. When we produce a sound-word, we pause and wait to see if the child responds and imitates the word. Then we repeat. The important thing is to alternate turns and wait for the child to respond. I pause – wait – move closer to the child – look at him as if expecting an answer – encourage a response.
• Options: is a very important strategy because it encourages speech without the child feeling that he has to answer. By using options, we indirectly encourage the child to say the word, for example if we know that he wants the apple, instead of asking him “what do you want?” can we give choices e.g. do you want a banana or an apple?
• Sentence completion: after you have shown the object and talked about it you can use the “sentence completion” strategy to have the child say the desired word. E.g. swing! He swings! The child went to the park and does…..(swing).
• Sabotage: intentionally forget an important step in a child’s routine so that he is “forced” to ask for what he wants e.g. when he is thirsty, give him the glass and “forget” to put water. He can say water!
• Extension: with this strategy we repeat the child’s utterance, adding a word that is omitted, e.g. if the child says “daddy cookie” you can say “daddy EATS cookie” or expand the child’s vocabulary by giving a more detailed description. If the child says “tomato” you can say “a big tomato”
• Acoustic Emphasis: this strategy is used when we want to emphasize the word or structure that we want the child to master. For example, if the child omits a sound like “new”, we emphasize it, “water!” if the child says “dad” and we want him to learn the articles we will emphasize “oooo dad”
  Fewer questions: when we constantly ask the child questions,feels like he has to say a word, so he doesn’t speak if he doesn’t feel ready to answer.
  Instead of saying “Grandma’s here, say hello!” We can say “hello”, repeatedly without asking the child to repeat. Hearing this, the child is likely to imitate.
  Instead of saying to the child: “Daddy! Say daddy!” We can say “Daddy! Daddy! Pa pa pa! Daddy!” Then we pause and wait for the child to respond. If not, we repeat again.
• Aural comprehension – memory: Once the child recognizes the names of objects, we ask them to choose an object between 2-3, in order to strengthen auditory comprehension and memory. For example, where is the duck? Having them choose the duck and the cow, or we can ask for an object with the sound, for example “mmmmmmmm” and the child catches the cow. In older children, we encourage the understanding of complex commands. For example, we take various blocks and ask the child: “put it on the table, put it under the chair”.

In conclusion, these strategies contribute to and enhance the development of speech, through play and the meaningful interactions of everyday life.