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Over the years, I have learned that one of the most powerful tools in working with children who have developmental and communication delays is simply this: slow down. Slow the speech, the gestures, the instructions, the demonstrations. Slow the pace of the interaction until you and the child find a rhythm that truly supports connection and understanding.

I say “simply,” but in practice, it is anything but simple.

For many years, I worked with children with developmental delays and their families and directed a large interdisciplinary program for the assessment and treatment of children and young adults with developmental delays and disabilities.

My work put me in constant dialogue with speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, special educators, psychologists, psychometricians, and parents and siblings of children with special needs. Across these varied settings and professional languages, one principle repeatedly demanded attention: children learn best when adults adjust their pace to match the child’s developmental readiness.

Children with sensory, emotional, reasoning, learning, and communication challenges are easily overwhelmed when adults move too quickly, or speak too quickly, when topics shift suddenly, or when we offer instructions and explanations faster than they can be understood.

At adult speed, children may appear inattentive, confused, or disengaged. Yet these behaviors often reflect not a lack of interest, but a mismatch between the adult’s tempo and the child’s capacity to take things in.

More Time to Make Sense of the World

When we slow ourselves, our voices, our hands, our expectations, something almost physiological happens. The child has the time to orient, to register, to begin making sense of what we are presenting. They can attend more fully, hold information in mind, and formulate their response.

Our default tempo as adults, professionals, and nonprofessionals often exceeds the child’s capacity to receive the stimuli, to create meaning, and to formulate their response, especially if that child processes information differently.

For children with developmental differences, the mental act of decoding a word, interpreting a facial expression, shifting attention, or forming a response can take far more time than neurotypical mediators realize. Look and listen to what is not being said or done. Let the child’s readiness, not your agenda or comfort zone, set the pace.

Slowing down isn’t about dumbing down. It’s about offering the child a chance to be present, to engage, to succeed. But this isn’t a one-size-fits-all prescription. What is “slow enough” for one child may be too slow for another. The art lies in knowing your child, in observing their cues, reading their responses, and making micro-adjustments throughout each moment of interaction.

Too often, adults fill silences with more words, not realizing that the child may still be thinking or organizing their response. We need to slow down, wait for their verbal or behavioral response, and determine what they have learned and understood, so we can decide if we need to change something in our behaviors, content, or verbal presentation, including vocabulary, syntax, tone, rhythm, and speed.

Slowing down supports our co-regulation. Interesting, motivating activities combined with calm, slow mediation help the child manage their sensory input, their emotional regulation, their attention, their learning and behavioral responses. The sharing, learning and play environments become emotionally safer and more predictable.

When we slow down, children begin to internalize these more comprehensible rhythms. They learn to pay attention to details and to the bigger picture. They find it much easier to imitate. They learn that communication, instruction, and learning are two-way processes. Slowing down fosters not only better communication and more successful cognition, it also increases confidence, empathy, self-regulation and social understanding.

Wait for the child to register what you said or did, and for the child to respond. Wait quietly, patiently for signs of attention and comprehension. A shift of their head and eyes, a change of expression on their face, a small gesture of recognition, a comprehending verbal response, a relevant movement response.

Wait until the child has had a chance not only to hear and to see, but to understand, to absorb, and begin to integrate what is being said or done. Only then begin the next step.

Repetition helps. Repetition in a slightly different way sometimes helps. A story or a more meaningful context sometimes helps. Linkages to what is familiar and understood help. Wait for signs of comprehension, however subtle. Wait before you move on.

These principles apply across all clinical and educational domains. Whether assessing a child’s abilities, guiding a therapeutic activity, or teaching a new task or value, the right tempo matters. Children with sensory-processing challenges, motor-planning difficulties, perceptual or cognitive delays, attentional vulnerabilities, anxiety, or emotional dysregulation all benefit from more deliberate pacing.

Each child has a natural tempo, shaped by neural processing, temperament, experience, and sometimes by culture or language. Adults tend to have their own individual tempo, an ingrained, nearly automatic speed of speaking, explaining, reacting.

I did not fully appreciate this until I watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on television with my own children. His pace seemed impossibly slow to me. He walked slowly, talked slowly, changed his sweater slowly, and repeated himself again and again. Yet my children were glued to his every movement, to his every utterance. Only later did I understand that Fred Rogers was not slow by accident. He had mastered a developmental tempo that offered children just enough time to absorb and integrate what they saw and heard. His pace was an invitation.

In clinical practice, adjusting one’s speed often feels unnatural at first. I would tell trainees and parents that they were probably going at the right pace for their child only when it felt (to the adult) almost uncomfortable; when their own (the adult’s) slow interactions seemed like it hurt. That is usually the moment when the child’s eyes brighten, their attention steadies, and the participation and learning begin to flow.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

To make this point, I developed a small demonstration to go with my lectures. I would ask for three volunteers who said they enjoyed performing and who would not mind being watched by the rest of the class.

They waited outside while I set up a video of a cartoon dog dancing to The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Each volunteer saw the dance only once, but in one of three versions: normal speed, fast, or slow. Then they were asked to reproduce by memory as many dance steps as they could.

The results were always revealing and often quite funny. Those who watched the fast version remembered next to nothing. Those who saw the regular speed version caught a few steps. But those who watched the slow-motion version could often recall and reproduce a surprising amount of the routine. Slowness made the patterns and sequences visible, memorable, and replicable.

Everything is Coming Too Fast

I have heard children say, “Everything is coming too fast.” Others describe their world as disjointed, as though events were happening at chaotic speed or in slow motion, yet without coherence. Still others report that time itself seems to shift unpredictably, too fast at one moment, too slow at another.

Adults often fill these gaps with more words, more activity, more explanation, mistaking silence for emptiness rather than time for processing. We must learn to recognize, based on the child’s response or non-response, to adjust our vocabulary, tone, rhythm, and speed so that communication and understanding become mutual rather than one-sided.

This slowing down is not a lowering of expectations. It is a way of offering children the conditions they need to meet our higher expectations. In calmer, slower interactions, children are better able to manage their sensory input, to organize their perceptions, to make needed associations, to regulate their emotions, to coordinate their movements and responses, and to meaningfully engage socially. Pacing, predictability and gentleness allow them to approach interpersonal interactions, play and learning with less fear and more curiosity.

In time, children begin to internalize these more comprehensible rhythms. They become more capable of noticing detail, detecting patterns, imitating others and following multi-step actions. They learn that communication is reciprocal and that they, too, can initiate. With this comes a rise in confidence, empathy and self-regulation.

Parentese

Parents intuitively slow down and make verbal changes in their voice and gestures with infants and young children. “Parentese,” the slower, exaggerated, melodic speech adults use with young children, is not sentimental nonsense. It is a biologically tuned teaching system. Even young siblings slow down and modify their speech patterns when talking to younger siblings. They know that slowing down works.

Of course, slowing down does not mean repeating mechanically or endlessly. Repetition must be meaningful, integrated into activities and interactions the child enjoys and values.

Not all children require slowness and repetition. Some neurodivergent children process language and information with remarkable speed and prefer brisk pacing with minimal repetition.* Knowing the child you are engaging with and adjusting accordingly is learned by the adult mediator during open-minded, empathic interactions.

Learning has its own clock. So does development. When we better understand and respect the child and the learning and development process, rather than continue being blindly led by our unconscious habits, children with delays often reveal capacities that were previously overlooked or underestimated.

Slowing down is not a mere technique or performance, but an intentional willingness to meet the child where they are, and to move with them, step by step, at a tempo that truly supports their participation and learning.

* Some children with neurodivergences are particularly quick processors of language and information and prefer that their teachers and adult mediators speed up the language and the lessons and have little need or patience for repetition. We have to know who the individual learner is and make adaptive adjustments to suit that particular child and the goals of the activity and mediation.

Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim

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