You are listening to episode 79, the importance of pre-verbal skills in language and communication.

Welcome to this episode. I am so excited to welcome one of my favorite accounts on social media, raising little talkers.

This is Melissa Mini. She is a speech-language pathologist and mother. And we're going to be talking all about pre-verbal skills. Thank you so much for joining me, Melissa.

Thanks for having me. Well, I'm so excited that I got to connect with you on social media. I love your account. I love the way you give information.

What do you love most about being a speech-language pathologist? And why did you start raising little talkers?

So my favorite part about being a speech therapist is helping parents connect and communicate with their children.

I've always known communication to be the bedrock of any relationship, but it wasn't really until I had children of my own that I really felt the impact that talking has on the parent baby and parent toddler relationship.

And for my husband and I, we always talk about this. How when our kids started to talk, they felt more like real people with desires and thoughts and ideas and feelings.

And we saw them really starting to take shape and felt more bonded and more connected to them. This was even more pronounced for my husband who didn't have that birth or nursing bond that I had.

So that really is a shift that happened for me after I had children. And it's one of my favorite things to foster in other families right now.

Oh, that's so great. Yeah. And I started the raising little talkers Instagram page at the start of the pandemic for a few reasons, mainly to keep my skills sharp while I wasn't able to see clients, but also to connect with other moms and empower them to help their kids at home while they didn't have access to speech therapy.

And I really had no intention of it turning into a business. But as it started to grow, I began doing consultations and then turning down requests for consultations because I didn't have the time.

Well, being at home with my kids and I really realized the need for what I was offering and decided to create a course so I could help more parents than my schedule allowed. And that's how it all started.

Awesome. And you're going to be able to give more information about your course at the end because I think it's so great that you provide these resources. And like you said, in a pandemic, parents really wanted this information.

And I think it is going to be something that we see on social media that will carry, I think, past the pandemic too, because social media has become such a great place for reliable education from people we trust.

And I definitely learned so much from you being so obviously geared towards speech language pathology has been so important for me as a pediatrician to learn too. So I really appreciate what you're doing on there.

I'm so glad. Thank you.

So yeah, I'm like, again, I'm so happy that we're able to connect and we're talking about pre-verbal skills. And so I think it's such an important thing that we discuss because we talk about language and communication, but there's a difference between the two.

And you know, spoken language like the words we hear children say a lot of that begins even before we hear that first word. So what exactly are pre-verbal skills and why are they so important?

Absolutely, they're not talked about enough. So pre-verbal skills are these necessary building blocks that each child needs in order to start talking.

We can't expect a child to talk if they have weaknesses in or are missing any of these skills. So they should be developed by 12 months. And like I said, it's really not talked about enough.

We often hear parents like really excited about this big speech and language milestone of babbling and then first words and sort of not talking about any of the other mini milestones that come in between those or even before babbling.

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