Signing with Baby - A Good Idea? ABSOLUTELY!!!

We are starting to sign with Willow. Now that she is nearly 10 months old and has better hand coordination and can clearly understand more and more words, we thought it was a good time to start. There is a great article on Baby Center called Signing with your baby or toddler: How to communicate before your child can talk.

As we all know, babies can understand far more then they can communicate. Their language skills aren't developed enough for them to speak words but that doesn't mean they don't know what you are talking about. There are many benefits to signing with your baby, but some people have the belief that signing with your infant can actually hamper verbal language skills. This is simply NOT TRUE. According to the Baby Center article referenced above, "Signing is about enhancing, not replacing language. It has to be used alongside normal speech so your baby can make the link between the gesture and the word. And because you need to make sure your baby is looking at you, she's concentrating hard on what you're saying as well as on what you're doing. When your baby can sign back, communication becomes two-way. If, for example, she tells you she can hear a plane, you can respond, "You heard an airplane? Yes, I can see it. Look, it's over there. Isn't it loud?" In this way, you probably spend more time talking to your child, which is one of the best ways of helping speech develop."

There are studies that have been conducted that concluded that signing with your baby actually increases their verbal skills. For example, the study Impact of Symbolic Gesturing on Early Language Development conducted in 2000 by Susan W. Goodwyn , Linda P. Acredolo and Catherine A. Brown concluded that "gesturing does not hamper verbal development and may even facilitate it."

In fact, a study published in 2004 by Jana M. Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow called Gesture Paves the Way for Language Development found that "gesture both precedes and is tightly related to language development."

Interesting. So, signing with your baby can help them develop their verbal skills. Wonderful! Other benefits of signing with your baby include less frustration, since you can understand what your infant is trying to tell you and a closer bond with your baby because they can tell you things they have observed and how they feel so you know what they are thinking!

Convinced that signing is what we wanted to do with Willow, we got a few tools to help us out.

Most of the signs you will be using are really easy and frankly what you would expect the sign to be if you made it up. For example:

"where?" — shrug your shoulders, with your palms held out
"car" — steer an imaginary wheel
"book" — hold hands flat with palms up

The flash cards are really awesome because they show the picture of what you are signing and then tell you in words how to sign. VERY user friendly.