“I wouldn’t take the approach of shutting the child down and saying, ‘Don’t go on and on about something that only interests you’—that will only turn off the child to conversation,” says Alexandra Lobo, an SLP and co-founder of Dramatic Pragmatics in Rye Brook, New York. “But I also wouldn’t let the child continue to go on tangents about their own interest. The world will be unkind about that. So we need to use the home as a safe space to teach conversational partnering.”