Baby Signs

Baby E is 11 months old today.

In the last month, with finally getting our family on a basic schedule, she's finally started sleeping well at night, usually waking only once if at all. She's also napping much better during the day now that I've started putting her down for naps a little earlier--about 2 hours after waking up in the morning, and then about 3 hours after waking from her first nap.

We are so grateful that we're finally able to get somewhat predictable sleep. I can't believe how much easier it makes my days just to have 2-3 hours when the baby is napping to focus on spending time with the older girls and accomplishing household tasks.

Baby E is adding more words and baby signs to her vocabulary steadily. KLee asked about the baby signs we're using, so I'll talk a little about that today.

Essentially, most babies are able to understand and want to communicate before they are able to make themselves understood verbally. They develop fine motor skills before developing verbal skills, so using gestures to communicate is something most babies do to some extent even without being specifically taught to do so.

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As is common, I've noticed that a lot of my girls' tantrums in late infancy through the preschool years have stemmed from not being able to communicate adequately what they want to say. Having signs has helped significantly in minimizing their frustration--especially with Baby E, who knew what she wanted and wanted so deperately to communicate long before we could understand any of her words.

Learning signs can also help a child's language understanding and development, as it helps develop the brain's language and learning centers. I would guess that using her hands to communicate helps Baby E develop motor skills as well. Using baby signs may be one of the easier ways to give a child the benefit of a second language early in life.

As soon as a child is able to start using gestures to communicate by waving, pointing at things, shaking their head yes/no, etc, he or she is capable of learning and using simple signs to communicate.

Most people start with one or two of the most important verbs and nouns. We started with milk, more, and all done. We're gradually adding more signs such as book, potty, sleep, drink, eat, no, mommy and daddy as we have need of them and feel ready to add new signs.

Baby E fairly consistently uses the signs for milk, more, and all done and is starting to use others. Sometimes she picks up the sign or approximates it on her own, and other times we need to help her shape the sign with her hand quite a few times before she figures out how to do it.

I feel that, even if she's not using the signs, seeing us use them enhances her understanding of language. Sometimes I will say a word to her and she won't seem to understand it, and then when I use the sign she will visibly brighten and begin responding to both the gesture and the spoken word as if she understands them.

When I trained dogs I always tried to use both a hand gesture and a word together. Although children are certainly different from dogs, I do think that in both cases having both the visual and auditory cue is helpful in developing understanding and holding attention.

There are basically a couple of different approaches to baby signing. One uses modified or made-up signs along with ASL, with the only real goal being that the parent and child understand what's being communicated. The other focuses on actual sign language (in our case, ASL--American Sign Language) words, although a few made-up gestures may be used also.

This is a minor, but relevant, difference, since a language like ASL is truly a language of its own spoken by many people, while non-ASL baby signs are more an extension of communication in spoken English than a language of their own. Theoretically, the approach may be different, but practically the results are very similar.

ASL, like other foreign languages, has a different syntax, sentence structure, and way of communicating things than English does, but you don't really run into that when just teaching basic nouns and verbs to your baby. You're not trying to carry on a whole conversation in ASL, after all--just communicating some key words and concepts to enhance your communication in spoken English.

(BTW, my sister Amy is getting her ASL interpreter's license--I wonder if I could talk her into doing a guest post on ASL language and culture for the uninitiated? I think that would be interesting.)

Probably the most definitive work on baby signing is by Drs. Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn, whose first book, Baby Signs: How to Talk to Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk, was published in 1996. They started noticing in 1982 that pre-verbal babies often made up gestures to communicate, and spent 20 years researching what would happen if parents tried to help babies to communicate that way even more. You can read more about their research and their programs at http://www.babysigns.com

The Baby Signs program uses a combination of ASL and parent-invented signs. Their idea is that some of the actual ASL signs are rather complicated and difficult for babies to shape with their hands. So, in the interest of making it easier for infants to communicate rather than with the goal of teaching a second language, they do use signs that are not "real" ASL sign language. From what I've read, though, the more recent edition of the book uses a larger percentage of actual ASL signs than the original version did.

If you're interested in learning actual ASL baby signs, I found a great website at http://www.mybabycantalk.com with an online video dictionary which actually plays clips of the signs being acted out in Windows Media Player. It's so much easier to follow and understand how to make the sign that way than just trying to figure it out from pictures.

The website http://signingbaby.com has quite a bit of information about Baby Signing, including updates about baby signing in the news, helpful articles, and a fairly extensive list of links and resources, including more online signing dictionaries. They have an interesting article examining the debate about ASL versus non-ASL baby signing, arguing that just as we don't teach baby talk instead of properly-spoken English, there's no need to use non-ASL signs with babies.

I like the idea of using actual ASL with Baby E because, for one thing, if I'm going to teach her to communicate in another language I may as well choose one that she'll be able to use and expand on more as she gets older. Especially with an aunt who is fluent in ASL, my kids are interested in learning to "talk with hands", and this way they'll have a head-start at being able to communicate with the Deaf community. I like the idea that the signs Baby E is using are signs that anyone who knows sign language would understand.

I know that a lot of camp counselors and school teachers like to use hand signs of one type or another to communicate with kids. Visual communication can have many advantages. It can be a great way to communicate in a noisy area, or when quiet is needed. It appeals to more senses than just hearing, it's more physically active for little wigglers, and I'm guessing it may be particularly helpful for visual or kinesthetic learners. Also, it is simply a beautiful and highly communicative language, and could add a whole new dimension to anyone's appreciation and expression of language in general.

You could, of course, easily combine it with some lessons about the cultures in which it is used to add understanding of a specific language and culture that is foreign to most hearing people. I think the very fact of having more than one way to communicate an idea lays important foundations for kids' development, communication skills and even worldview.

At this point, though, our goal isn't really to teach Baby E a second language. We just want to communicate better with her. The other benefits are just bonuses to that.

I never attempted to use more than one or two signs with AJ, although I think she would have benefitted from it a lot, being a later talker. M&M was walking and talking pretty well very shortly after she started seeming to really WANT to do so (she'd walk up to someone and say "hi" quite clearly at 11 months), so we only ended up using a few signs with her because she could quickly say almost anything she wanted to communicate.

We've used signs a little more extensively with Baby E, and she seems to be enjoying and understanding them well so far. As a side benefit, the older girls have fun learning and using them with her too.