When do babies start talking clearly?
I can't understand what my child is saying, is this normal?
Well, it depends. 1 and 2 year olds speech is usually harder to understand than older kids because their speech system is still developing.
It is normal for you and close family members to understand your child better than anyone else-- you are the expert! Your brain learns to interpret the way that your child says certain things, like when your child says “tuti” for cookie or “baper” for diaper, or lately my 3 year old saying “Pinnie Woo” for Winnie the Pooh! Our parent brain understands them better than anyone else.
With that said, you want to know if how much you or others understand of your child is normal. This chart below should help. The term intelligibility has absolutely nothing to do with how smart (intelligent) a child is; it means how well they can be understood by other people, how “intelligible” they are. The range goes from 0% (you don’t understand anything they say) up to 100% (you understand everything.) This chart shows how well a child should be understood by a particular age. It is separated into a You (the person/people who spend the most time with your child) and an Others column. As you've already learned, you will generally understand more than the grocery store clerk or an auntie that sees the child only once a month .
So back to your question, when do babies start talking clearly?
Babies start talking clearly around 3 years old. At 3 years old, it would be expected that the people closest to your child can understand almost everything they say, and other people can understand more than half.
Well, it's hard to understand my child and I want to help them get better. Why is it hard to understand my child?
Often, it is hard to understand what a child says because they haven't learned to pronounce all the sounds yet. For example, if your child says "wight" for "light" because they haven't learned to pronounce "L" (which we wouldn't expect them to learn until they are preschool aged or older). It can then be confusing to know what your child is talking about if they are trying to tell you about something out of context.
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