Verbal Self-Control
A lot of effort will go into training your child to have control over his speech. You will be working on this area for many, many years. The following is a brief summary of the different forms this training will take.
At first you will be training your 8 – 11 month old to control his noises. It is totally natural for a little one to experiment with his ‘voices’ at this stage, and you are not trying to suppress this. However, you do not have to accept the prolonged high-pitched screaming, and you can start to gently encourage quieter sounds, very effectively, by modeling a whisper voice.
When your little one is 9 – 16 months old you will mostly focus on helping your little one respond appropriately when he disagrees with your choices and decisions. At this age he will most likely express it with a loud and horrible fuss! If you have a calm and consistent consequence for this, such as 5 – 15 minutes of isolation, you can greatly minimize this behaviour.
You will encounter the verbal ‘no’ and ‘I don’t want to” etc, when your child is between 14 – 44 months of age. Your child’s self-centredness is very obvious during this stage. A tight routine, first time obedience, positive teaching times will all encourage verbal self-control during these months.
After this the hard work starts.
You will progressively and constantly be working on issues such as: -
HOW they speak – e.g. attitude, tone, pronunciation and volume.
WHAT is spoken – e.g. kindness or unasked for opinions or comments.
WHEN they speak – e.g. the appropriateness of the situation, also not constantly speaking every waking minute.
WHO is being spoken to – e.g. not to dominate conversations, wait for adults to initiate before joining in an adult conversation.
Proverbs 25:11 A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver
