Baby Sign Language - Useful Guide For Moms

Sign language and non verbal communication can help parents a great deal in communicating with their baby from the very early stages of his/her life. It has been found that babies have the capacity of understanding language as early as at 6 months of age, but are rarely seen to begin speaking before they are at least a year old. This makes sign language a helpful tool both for parents and the baby in order to exchange simple messages. Babies naturally have ways of conveying what they want or need. For instance, if your baby puts up her hands or stretches them out, in all probability she wants to be picked up. Similarly, babies open their mouth to indicate that they are hungry or thirsty, and turn their face away if they do not want to be held by a person. It is also common knowledge that the person closest to the baby, usually the mother, knows from experience if anything is troubling the baby from the way the baby cries and from how she responds to attempts at pacifying her. In addition to this, learning and teaching the baby a set of few basic hand gestures and signs is extremely useful in improving such parent-child communication.

The American Sign Language and the British Sign Language are among the most popular sign languages that parents choose to learn and a teach their babies. You may even come up with a few simple signs on your own that you share with your baby, provided that you are consistent in the use of these signs and that they do not clash with those that are part of an already established system that you are using. Start with only a limited number of signs that stand for very basic and necessary concepts such as “food”, “water”, “more”, “hot”, “cold”, “hard”, “wet”, and so on. Make the baby understand what each sign stands for by associating each of these concepts/objects with the corresponding sign on a very regular basis. It is useful to always utter the word along with the sign you are using to convey a certain meaning. Do not pressurize the baby by using too many signs while talking to her, and do not be unrealistic in your expectations about the rate at which she would pick up the sign language. The best way to go about baby sign language is to encourage the baby to use the hand sign frequently by showing her the object it represents. You should always encourage the baby by smiling, patting and cuddling her when she identifies an object and uses the correct sign for it.