He said very few words. Yet he had followed the whole sentence.

At breakfast, Camille asked Malo, her almost-three-year-old son, to put his spoon in the sink, then choose the rabbit book for the sofa.

Malo climbed down from his chair, put away the spoon, found the book and settled on the sofa, patting the cushion beside him.

He had answered the whole sentence. He simply had not done it with a sentence of his own.

When a child speaks very little, it is easy to confuse what they can say with what they understand. Camille had been waiting for words to measure an understanding that Malo was already showing in other ways.

Speaking and understanding do not always move at the same pace

Understanding the words we hear and managing to use them ourselves are different skills, which may develop at different rates. The number of words a child says does not tell the whole story of what they understand.

That does not mean every silence hides perfect understanding. It simply invites us to notice quiet answers too: an object brought over, a glance towards the door when an outing is announced, a gesture or the next moment of a familiar story anticipated before the page turns.

Camille had got into the habit of checking: “What’s this?”, “Can you say car?” and “What colour is the ball?” Malo rarely answered. Those questions mainly asked him to produce a word on demand, not to show what he had understood in an ordinary situation.

Observe without turning everyday life into a test

Camille did not replace her questions with a new set of tests. She kept speaking to Malo in simple, precise sentences, naming what they were doing, reading the same stories and, above all, leaving him a little time after a question.

She also began accepting more ways to answer.

When a word arrived, even an imperfect one, she could rephrase it naturally in her reply, without interrupting to make him repeat it. The aim was not to prove that Malo understood everything. It was to stop assuming that he understood nothing whenever he did not answer like an adult.

Noticing these signs at home is no substitute for professional advice. If you are worried about a child’s language, if they lose skills they had acquired or if they do not seem to hear or understand age-appropriate phrases, it is best to speak to a health professional.

That evening, Camille asked Malo to put his striped pyjamas on the bed and choose a story. He came back with the pyjamas and two books, because understanding an instruction had clearly not stopped him trying to negotiate.

Malo had not said it all. This time, Camille had looked more closely at everything he was already answering.