Save your files to your phone or computer now.

Today: Open the guide. Read “Start Here & Why This Conversation Starts Earlier Than You Think” (pp. 5–9), then go straight to your child’s specific age band in the Age-by-Age Roadmap (pp. 10–22). Don’t read the whole roadmap. Just your child’s stage.

Before bed: Open the Word-for-Word Scriptbook and find one opener that matches your child’s age. Read it out loud to yourself, once, even if it feels stiff. Stiff is normal on the first read.

Tomorrow morning: Pick one ordinary moment already in your day, bath time, the school run, or bedtime, and decide right now which one it will be. That’s Day 1 of the 8-Week Parent Action Plan (p. 34). You’re not scheduling a big talk. You’re just saying one small, true thing, almost word for word from the script.

I still think about that Tuesday night with Ada more than I’d like to admit. What eventually changed things for us wasn’t one perfect conversation, it was showing up for the small ones, again and again, even when they felt clumsy. That’s really all this guide is asking of you. Not perfection tonight, just one honest sentence, and then another one next week.

You already did the hard part by starting. The rest just needs your consistency.

Esther