Newborn Parenting Information - When Should Baby Talk?

As the mother, you will greatly influence your child's ability to communicate. Your baby will hear you speak more than anyone else, and she'll learn to follow your speech patterns. The best way to teach baby to talk is to model your own speech carefully. Baby talk is okay early on, but you should completely switch to normal speech by the sixth month.

When dealing with an infant, I think it's best to avoid pronouns (I, you, me) and instead use names or titles: "Does Samantha want to eat? Is Samantha hungry?" "Daddy's home! Can you see Daddy?" "Give Mommy a kiss!"

Doing this will eventually show your child that everyone has a name. Your baby should understand her own name by about the fifth month and the word no somewhere near the ninth month. By ten months, your infant should begin responding to spoken requests, showing that she understands what you're saying. And between ten and eighteen months, you can look forward to hearing baby's first words. (Babies begin babbling much earlier than this, and many first-time parents may "interpret" these babbles as actual words—but in most cases, a four- or five-month-old "saying" a word just got lucky putting the right sounds together.)

Since you're a first-time parent, I can't stress this enough: Every baby develops at his own pace, and the pace of devel­opment does not directly correlate to I.Q. Just because your baby doesn't start talking until eighteen months doesn't mean she is less intelligent than the neighbor baby who started speaking words at ten months. Some babies develop gross motor skills before language or vice versa. There need be no "race" between babies.

However, if your child hasn't started speaking any words by eighteen months, you might want to have a professional check everything out. Before the age of eighteen months, just relax and keep playing games and enjoying your baby. Your pediatrician can listen to your baby's sounds much earlier than that and assure you that she is on a normal developmental pattern.

Here's the irony: Many parents who have worried, "When will my child talk?" have a few months later said, "When will she shut up?" Kind of puts talking in perspective, doesn't it?