Supporting Complex Communication in Toddlers

Gestural communication

After your toddler passes through the first four developmental stages—mastering the ability to calm herself, engage you, exchange simple gestures, and exchange complex gestures—she'll continue to refine these abilities even as she develops more sophisticated ones. In our adult lives, we never stop using the early capacities we acquired as infants and toddlers; we further develop them and add other, later strengths to the mix. Thus, as adults we may be strong gestural communicators just like our toddlers. In fact, we trust that communication system more than the spoken words we also use, because our gestures are learned earlier, and are used for basic emotional problem solving. For example, if you should find yourself in a dark alley with a suspicious-looking stranger coming at you, you would probably react to the menacing expression on his face rather than trust his seemingly innocent request to know what time it is. Similarly, if someone at a party tells you how well you look but you've already registered a fleeting look of dismay on his face, you won't be convinced by his polite remark.

All through our lives, we use this early learned gestural system to convey our emotional intentions. We can read these same gestures in other people, and size up whether someone is happy, sad or angry; nice or mean; or approving or disapproving of us. Adults at social gatherings trade thousands of subtle gestural cues. We may tell an off-color joke to one person, assume a formal and respectful tone to another, and laugh heartily with a third, all on the basis of those individuals' special body postures, facial expressions, and tones of voice. These gestures convey reams of information that we use as we interact.

All the basic emotional themes of life are read and expressed through such complex nonverbal communications. That's why it's so important to be an animated gestural communicator, in addition to sharing long verbal dialogues, as your child progresses through later developmental stages. She will need these skills when she's out playing on the playground with her peers in just a few years. So much rapid-fire gestural communication goes on between children in that setting! When a child turns away slightly from another child, sending a clear message of "Don't bug me!" the second child will usually know right away that she had better go look for someone else to play with. If the child doesn't register the cue and continues to hang around, however, she may be teased and made a scapegoat because she doesn't know when to back off.

Throughout our lives we rely on this nonverbal communication system to convey basic information about whether the world is safe or not, and whether or not we're accepted or rejected by others. We also use the gestural system to constantly give new meaning to our symbolic world, or refine shades of meaning in our words. In our therapeutic practice, we've come to use the acronym WAA—meaning "words, action (gestures), and affect (feelings)"—as a quick way to refer to the process by which gestures and emotions nuance the meaning of spoken words. We urge parents to link their child's spoken words and their own with gestures and emotions that make the child's comprehension richer.

As your child gets older, you'll want to continue to base your conversations on actions she performs. For instance, when the two of you are involved in pretend play, you could steer your dollies' conversation toward commenting on why the dolls suddenly got so sleepy, or why they decided to change their clothes. You can talk about the actions of the drama you and your child engage in, rather than just talking for the sake of talking. WAA conversations snare the child's attention because her feelings, her muscles, and her words combine to give her a more nuanced comprehension of the words she hears.

Mastering complex gestural communication not only paves the way toward developing ideas through pretend play but also facilitates the move toward spoken language. Each time your child opens and closes 30 to 40 gestural circles of communication in a row, she is expressing a wish or a desire that could be summed up in a spoken word or two. In fact, you can think of words as a sort of shorthand for elaborate gestural communications. When your little girl locks onto your eyes, takes you by the hand, yanks you toward the sideboard, and jumps up and down, pointing to an apple, her actions are a choreographed charade indicating "Get apple!"

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