Your Toddler’s Development – 2 to 3 years

Can you believe that your little one is now two? They will be using words all the time to tell you about their day, share exciting experiences, ask questions, comment on the world and assert their independence. Their speech is getting clearer every day and by the end of this year they will be understood even by unfamiliar listeners.

Read on to learn more about your child’s understanding and communication development between 2 and 3 years.

Listening & Understanding

At around two most children are able to follow simple instructions like ‘bring your hat here’ and by three most children can follow more complex instructions such as ‘go and get your hat from your bedroom and bring it to me’.

Your child will be able to answer questions about ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’, but might still have difficulty with more complex questions such as ‘why’ and ‘how'.

Your child is just beginning to understand the feelings of others and that these are not always the same as how they feel!

They will start to play for short periods with other children, but have difficulty sharing as they cannot reason, negotiate and find it hard to control their impulses.

Your child will start to play in new and creative ways, including using different objects to represent key items in their play - for example using a block to represent a piece of cake and putting this on a plate to feed to their teddy bear.

Communicating

Over this year the length of your child’s sentences increases from two words to four or more words (‘mummy come play in the tent’).

They will be talking to you all day for a wide variety of reasons - to request, to ask questions, to play, to seek comfort and to share a past experience.

Your child can now have a short conversation with you about a topic that they're interested in.

They will be asking many questions using ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’.

Their use of pronouns will emerge - you, me, mine and yours - but they will still sometimes get them mixed up.

Your child will talk away to themselves while playing and create long (and often entertaining) stories.

Your child will use lots of naming words (nouns) but you’ll also start to hear other types of words.

  • describing words (adjectives) – hungry, sunny, dirty
  • action words (verbs) – run, hide, stop
  • location words (prepositions) – under, behind, through
  • words for people (pronouns) – he, she, mine, yours

They will also starts using comparative words like big and bigger.

Your child will start to use grammatical markers like past tense and plurals but still might make a few mistakes such as ‘runned’ instead of ran and ‘sheeps’ instead of sheep.

Unfamiliar people will be able to understand most of what your three year old says. They will still have trouble with some more complex sounds like ‘z’, ‘sh’, ‘f’, ‘v’, ‘r’, and ‘th’ and some sound combinations will also be tricky. For example they may say ‘bider’ for spider and ‘stipe’ for stripe.

18 months to 2 years
3 to 4 years