Name: What Do You Do When Your Voice Sounds Like a Kid?
Uploaded: 2025-09-23T08:08:35.000Z
Duration: 10 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi, I'm Roger Love, celebrity voice coach and author of the best-selling book, Set Your Voice Free.

You know what I hear an awful lot from students?

This phrase, I'm an adult, but I sound like a kid.

Grownups come to me all the time, and they are 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and when you listen to them, you'd think that they were pre-puberty, somewhere around 10, 11, 12 max.

And here they are, trying to function as adults, with a voice of a child, thinking that they are somehow trapped in that choice, or that it's not a choice at all.

They're wondering why so many of all of their friends grew up, and when it was time for their voice to sound like adults, they all did, but what's different about them?

And they think to me that it literally is genetic, or a physical, or a mental issue, and I am here to tell you exactly what the issue is.

It is simply the wrong choice, with the wrong information to choose from.

When we're little, the voice is higher, and squeakier, and thinner.

The reason that is, is because your vocal cords are shorter and thinner, and your throat, and your Adam's apple, and the larynx, the house for the vocal cords, it's all smaller.

So your instrument is smaller, the vocal cords are smaller, the space inside there where the vocal cords live, it's all small, and the vocal cords are tiny.

There's a difference between a ukulele and a guitar.

A ukulele sounds high and thin, and a guitar is like, the size of the strings influences the body of the tone, how thick it is, how bassy it is.

So little kids sound like little kids because they have little cords.

Now, when a boy and a girl hits puberty, what happens is, at that moment, a male voice drops an entire octave.

So a male voice goes lower, and it just gets way, way lower than a woman's.

The reason that happens is because right around that time, a man's vocal cords and larynx and Adam's apple grow faster than a woman's.

A woman's Adam's apple and vocal cords and all of that stops growing at a fast rate by the time they get to the puberty age.

But a boy's larynx and vocal cords and vocal apparatus grows faster and continues to grow bigger.

That's why a boy's Adam's apple sticks out more.

Go into the room and find a boy and a girl, find a man and a woman, even better, and put your finger on their Adam's apple, or just look at their Adam's apple.

You will see the man's Adam's apple sticks out farther.

That's because the Adam's apple is bigger.

The larynx, the house vocal cords, bigger.

So during puberty, a man's voice normally drops because of the size of the Adam's apple and larynx changing.

So a woman's voice continues, and a man's voice, where it was, and a man's voice drops an octave.

Now, some boys, they have gotten used to that high tenor sound, and even when their voice drops an octave down when puberty happens, they have already gotten it in their head that this is the sound of their voice.

Every morning we wake up, we open our mouth, and we make sound.

And then every day past that, the brain and the body are trying to get together to make the same sound.

It's how we actually maintain our sanity.

So that I wake up in the morning, I go, yep, I'm Roger, yep, this is my room, yep, this is my voice, I'm still sane, okay, don't lock me away.

If I wake up and my voice is totally different, my brain says, who the heck are you, buddy?

What are you doing sleeping next to Roger's wife?

So the brain and the body kind of get together, and it gets used to keeping you in the same sound.

So some people have this really cute, high voice.

Maybe they're getting great response for it.

Maybe the girl who has this little cute, squeaky, high voice, as she gets a little older, she still has that cute, sweet personality, and she's used to people reacting to her as, oh, you're so cute, you have such a bubbly personality.

Maybe the guy who has that high voice that's kind of airy gets used to people thinking, oh, he's so sweet, he's so kind, he's not angry at anybody, we like him, he's so much fun.

Maybe they get used to the way people react to that higher, sweet, thinner, younger voice.

Maybe when voices change, people get afraid of us, because all of a sudden we're loud and we have volume and thickness, and that can put some people off when they hear.

So the brain is trying to keep you the same, and maybe the way people react to you is trying to keep you the same, no matter what.

In the end result, it is very easy for a boy or a girl to keep the same voice even after puberty happens if they try to keep the same voice for emotional reasons.

And here's all you need to do to fix it, no matter what age you are.

If your voice sounds like this, and you're a boy or a girl, all you have to do, two things.

You've got to get your Adam's apple to come down lower.

You literally have to get your Adam's apple from here to here.

You say, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, and they say, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum.

All I'm doing is pulling my tongue down, not back, pulling my tongue down.

I'm keeping the tongue, the tip of my tongue, right up against the back part of my teeth and the back part of my tongue, from the middle to the back, I'm pulling down.

And when I do that, I lower my Adam's apple.

Put your finger on your Adam's apple and say, mum, okay?

Now say, mum, with that Yogi Bear kind of a funny sound like this, like I have a cold in my nose.

Do you feel how your Adam's apple came down?

Step one, you've got to learn how to lower your Adam's apple.

Just play around with the position of your tongue or play around with that Yogi Bear sound and you will feel the Adam's apple come down.

When your Adam's apple comes down, the back part of your throat opens up and what was a squeaky little high thin sound suddenly becomes a bassy, lower, strong, full, rich sound for men or women.

So first step, get my Adam's apple down by practicing mum, mum, mum, go, go, go.

You're just trying to get used to your Adam's apple down.

The next thing is if you have a little kid's voice, it's because you have no edge and you have all air.

Do you feel that kind of a vibration in the back part of your throat edge?

That's the sound that the vocal cords make when they go longer into a longer, thicker position.

So instead of talking airy, you want to talk more edgy, airy, airy, airy, edgy, edgy, edgy.

I lower my Adam's apple down and I add the edge in.

And then I just went from being 10 years old to having a low larynx to adding the edge in to sounding like an adult.

All you have to do is add in the edge and lower your Adam's apple.

Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to all of those birthdays that you've avoided sounding like an adult and reaping the benefits of making sure that people understand that you are an adult.