How to talk to your baby before she can talk to you
About half a year ago, Scott Hanselman got me into baby signing. He was so enthusiastic about it that he succeeded in infusing the same excitement in me. I have a 15 months-old daughter Aylen (and a 3 year-old one too, Agustina), which was about 11 months back then. Make sure you read his initial post on baby signing as well as his update when his son Zenzo was 14 months old.
Just after a couple weeks signing 3 words to her (duck, drink and milk), she signed the duck! I was blown away by how fast she started with the first one, but it took another month for her to start picking up more and more signs. When she was exactly one year old (about a month after we started), I got a couple of books which tought me more techniques and approaches to signing to make it more effective. Three months later, she’s able to sign: duck, drink, milk, cookie/cracker, eat, more, baby, take a bath, need heulp, hot, dog, cat, monkey, flower, shoes, hat, pain, water, sleep, silence (and clip, which Agustina uses at the kindergarten to also mean silence), dance (this one she made it up and we learned what she meant!). That’s 22 words for a 15 months-old baby that can barely say Mom and Agus (her sister’s nickname and the first thing she learnt to say :)). And there are many more that she understands but she’s not signing yet.
Just like Scott felt, it’s not just a matter of teaching her something to make her “smarter” early on. There’s a new kind of connection that you can make with your baby. Aylen’s face shines when she sees that we can listen to her needs and help her. She no longer cries when she’s hungry or thirsty, or when she wants to take a bath. That’s huge.
It’s also a much better way of communicating when you need to explain something to her. For example, a couple nights ago she started to stand in the small wooden chairs we have for them to play. Agustina had tought her how to get on the chair to sit. But now she was standing on it just for fun (the fun of watching both my wife and myself getting angry and saying NO! to her :S). She just kept doing it, over and over, no matter how much we said to her. So I went to the excelent online ASL dictionary (the one for the sign language we’re teaching her), found the signs for chair, sit and stand, and grabbed her and the chair for a “talk”. I signed chair pointing repeatedly to it. Just after the third sign, she got the idea, and pointed to my bigger chair too, acknowledging that it was also a chair! I said “very good!!!”, and started with the signs for sit, helping her to sit, and reinforcing that that was good. Next with stand, reinforcing with signs that that was bad. After three or four repetitions, with her standing and seeing the “bad”/no face and sitting and seeing the “good”/yes face, she got the point, and started trying to stand on the damn chair :). My wife says she got tired of listening to me, rather than learning, haha… (and she added “that’s what we all do :p”, but I digress)
If you have an older kid, it’s even better, because you can engage him/her in teaching the little one too. We bought a couple DVDs from the Baby Signing Time collection (awesome stuff) which both Aylen and Agustina love. It’s playing on my TV almost every day for at least a couple hours. It teaches new signs through songs and showing other babies doing them, and it does so while pronouncing the words in english. That may sound obvious to you, but we live in Argentina, so english is not our primary language. However, both girls are now learning the words in both english and spanish at the same time! So my baby signs “baby” when you say the word in english AND spanish too! It’s simply amazing.
There were a few skeptics, granted, and there are still. The first concern they have is that teaching her to communicate so well through signs may delay her to speak. I read that this argument is similar to saying “don’t let your kid crawl, it will delay him to walk”. Talking is a more efficient medium than signing, just as walking is than crawling.
Moreover, I read that babies that signed actually learned to speak sooner and with less frustration because then can accompany the words they are trying to say with the corresponding sign, which greatly helps parents to understand them. This engages them more in trying to speak without feeling that nobody understands their babble. Also, this sign language counts as a second language they learn, activating neuron pathways that will supposedly help her to learn other languages easily in the future.
Only time will tell, but it’s absolutely thrilling. So, if you’ve a 10-12 months baby, you should start signing right-away!!!
/kzu
/kzu dev↻d