Infants and toddlers pick up words and their meanings at an amazingly rapid pace from the moment they are born. Feed their hunger for language and you'll be rewarded but patience is key. It takes repetition, often for years, before you'll be rewarded by a conversational child.

What to do in the interim? My children are early talkers. All three of them. Or maybe I'm just an early listener. Each one had a unique way of trying to be heard. Early on it was as subtle as a tilt of the head or an extra blink. Later it became more aggressive. They grab my hand and take me where they want to go. My youngest gets my shoes when he's ready to leave. He's clear, even if his words are still incomprehensible to non-family members.

Experts are full of advice about how to get your kids talking. Reading seems to be at the top of the list. But for many of this, reading to a moving target is challenging. When my oldest was a baby he'd grab any book I had and throw it across the room. He had an opinion and he didn't want to hear me reading. But start talking about trucks and cars and his ears perked right up.

Rather than belabor the point I talked to him. Eventually he grew to love books but my talking is what ensured that his language skills didn't suffer. After all, reading books is simply scripted speech. We're reading words that other people say. Sure there's a value to the classics. Books written by authors who really know their stuff. Of course at age three, most aren't reading the classics. We're into nursery rhymes and silly stories, most of which can be created from your imagination or repeated from latent memories of your own childhood.

So rather than stress about whether or not you've finished War and Peace with young Harvard, consider having conversation about a topic he enjoys. You'll improve his vocabulary and eliminate the frustration factor from the whole experience!