Baby Signs: First Conversations

Those first words from your baby are major milestones and generally begin around baby’s first birthday (mama/dada). For parents, the wait until the full language phase, which typically occurs around 16-24 months of age, can seem oh-so-long. But your baby is actually capable of communicating with you much earlier. Babies communicate with smiles and tears every day. But a baby’s fine motor skills are well developed and babies can quickly learn sign language beginning as early as 6 months! If you know American sign language, then you can teach this to your baby. If not, you can make up a sign system that works for your family and follows baby’s cues.

When our son turned 6 months old, we began signing words like “water,” “drink,” “food/eat,” “fell down,” “change diaper.” We made up signs that seemed logical to us, like pointing to one open hand for “more.” At 7 months old, our son spilled the cat’s water dish and made his first sign back to us: “water” (a sign that looks like “rain falling” with fingertips). A week later, crawling by the cat dish, he sat up and signed “water” again. He had remembered the first spill, and we were able to “discuss” a memory together. By 12 months old, he had a well-developed vocabulary of 85 different signs.

Amy Scavuzzo, parent educator with Blue Valley Parents As Teachers, was trained by the author of Baby Sing and Sign (Anne Meeker-Miller) to teach the program and incorporates it into her work with families after having used it herself at home. “As a mother and parent educator I have seen the power the use of signing has for families and their children,” she says. She writes that the use of a sign for help in particular “greatly reduced tantrums and frustration (by both parent and child).” Mark Connelly, Ph.D., a signing father and Kansas City pediatric psychologist, comments that signs may be even more beneficial for boys, who “due to sex differences in brain development typically are more delayed in proficiency with verbal communication yet thrive in the visual-spatial skills required when signing.”

You don’t need a book, but there are many available, such as Baby Signs: How to Talk With Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk, now in its third edition (Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn, Ph.D.s). These suggest signs for you to use with accompanying pictures. Several websites (use “baby signs” as search terms) also list signing “dictionaries” and show videos of babies signing, as do DVDs. One-handed signs tend to be more successful as they are easier for a child to perform than coordinating two hands simultaneously (and when does your busy baby or toddler have both hands free?).

There is no cause to worry that signing babies will eschew speech! Children have a year of successful communicating under their belt before the powerful speech switch is triggered, and they will rush to communicate with whatever tools they can summon. Also, speech is another symbolic sign system, and signing children have had valuable practice with symbolic language as they have already been reaping the rewards of successful communication with caregivers. Acredolo and Goodwyn, co-founders of Baby Signs Inc., write of their research: “Our NIH-supported research showed that infants exposed to signs during infancy had better receptive and expressive language vocabularies by the time they were2 and 3 years old. In fact, the infants who learned to use signs as infants had verbal IQ scores that remained high well into the elementary school years.” Connelly agrees: “there is no known downside to teaching sign language to preverbal children.”

One of the very rewarding things about baby signs, quite apart from the value of enabling a child to clearly express his needs to you without having to cry (“my food fell down and I can’t reach it!” “turn the light on!”, is that she or he becomes empowered to teach you a thing or two. Watch your baby make up new signs to match things going on in his or her world. I once found myself backtracking through the mall with son in a stroller and looking everywhere for the “alligator” he insisted we had passed. Sure enough, in the window display of one store he had spotted a stuffed alligator.

So, sign up and enjoy bonding over these earliest conversations with your child!

Casie Hermansson is a mom, writer and English professor at Pittsburg State University.