06/22/2026
Do other people understand my kid as much as I do?
Likely not, but how much your child is understood by others is very telling about their articulation development.
🗣️ Intelligibility is a long word to sum up a measure of how clear you child’s speech can be understood by others. Newer research has updated the numbers we speech therapists have used as guidelines for years and we include them on our parent and professional handouts on our website (🔗 in bio), but we still like describing it the old way to parents because it’s easiest to remember and understand.
💵 Imagine that when your child turns 1, they start working their way up to earning an intelligibility dollar. We want them to earn as much of that dollar during their first few years by gaining a quarter around each birthday. And again, these are very rounded estimates to keep it easy to understand and remember.
🪙 After their first birthday, they earn their first quarter - 25 cents, you should understand them at least 25% of the time.
🪙🪙 2nd birthday, 50cents, 50% intelligible.
🪙🪙🪙 Year 3 - 75% and so on.
The big question is usually, when do we as speech therapists come into the picture? Two ways:
1️⃣ When you feel like your child isn’t really making their way towards earning their next quarter. Their clarity of speech is not really improving over time and they may even start getting frustrated at not being understood.
2️⃣ When there’s a big difference between how many quarters you would give them versus what others would give them.
Always trust your gut feeling as a parent and ask your pediatrician if you have any concerns about your child’s speech development.
This topic is so important to us, we cover it in many ways, all of which can be found at the link 🔗 in our bio.
👩🏽💻Blog - The Lil’ Bit
🎥 Educational videos on our YouTube channel
📖Our children’s book series that build around the basics of intelligibility during your child’s early years so you don’t have to do the exhaustive research (we already did it for you)
Follow and subscribe for more educational content about early childhood development.
