Isaiah has started to say “like” quite a bit in his every day speech now. A lot of it comes from us, as we unknowingly add these common filler words. You start to pay attention though when your three year old begins doing it a lot. He’s a clean slate as far as grammar goes, and there is no reason for him to start adopting these bad speech patterns now, so Shanna and I have been making an effort to watch ourselves and avoid it.

It’s hard though. And once you start paying attention to it, you notice that almost everyone does it, like, all the time. Oops:)

Identifying the context that you use those words in is a good first step. I tend to use “like” when I am estimating something, for example “It’s like, four or five blocks away.”, and I could have used any number of other words to convey that.