baby sign language

I ran across a piece of paper today that read: “March 20, 2004. Today Sophie knows these signs: eat, drink, milk, hurt, more, dog, cat, bread, raisin, mommy, daddy, chicken, potty, bear, jump, music, go outside, sleep, spider, book, shoes, butterfly, moon, stars, light, cold, see, flower, blue, green, red, black, yellow, banana, apple, orange, tiger, draw.”   By ’sign’ I meant sign language.  Sophie knew 38 signs by the time she was thirteen months old.

It seems like a million years ago. I had sort of forgotten that, yes, learning sign language with the kids was something we did.  How could I have forgotten that?  It was so cool.

I don’t even remember how I came to the idea of baby sign language.  Another mother? Some mention in the various books I read while I was pregnant?  This might sound weird but seeing my baby signing underlined that even at ten months, Sophie was a thinking person.  Signing took some of the guesswork out of our relationship.  It gave the kids so much power. I HIGHLY recommend anyone with a little baby try it.

Basically, the idea is that babies have the smarts to understand and communicate long before they have enough motor control over their lips and tongue to make intelligible sounds. So you give them easy signs that they can make with their hands and they’ll start ‘talking’ as early as seven or eight months.

Sound impossible?  I mean, how do you ‘give’ them these signs?  It’s exactly the same process as babies learning to wave hello or goodbye.  They see the people around them wave (make a hand gesture that has meaning, that is, sign) every time they say hello or goodbye.  Sometimes the mom might even playfully wave a baby’s hand for them, saying, “Bye!  Say bye-bye.”  Same for learning the ’sign’ for Yes (nodding your head) and No (shaking your head).  That’s it.  That’s the whole technique.  They pick it up effortlessly from seeing mom do it.  Easy.

I started signing a handful of words with Sophie when she was about seven months old.  Starting with just a couple of signs was a way to not feel overwhelmed.  That way the hard part wasn’t remember the sign, it was remembering to do the signs. Because, of course, there is no sense for a long time that it’s doing anything, so it felt kind of silly. “Are you hungry [do the sign for EAT]?” “Would you like some more [do the sign for MORE]” “Did you see that kitty? [do the sign for CAT]“  But I stuck with it and a few months later, Sophie started making awkward signs back—I thought.  I wasn’t sure.  They were vague and crudely made.  Maybe I was fooling myself?

Then one day, we were riding in the truck in the rain, her beside me in her carseat, and we came up to a stoplight.  She looked out the window and clear as day pointed to the patterns of water on the window, looked at me then back at the window, and then did the sign for RAIN.

I squealed!  I probably startled her, I was so excited.  “Yes, it’s raining,” I said, signing RAIN back.  (Good thing we were at a stoplight.)  “You can see the RAIN on the window.”  She beamed at me.  She was THRILLED.  It was the Hellen Keller moment!  You know, where she figures out that the sign for water is this stuff coming out of the pump?  Sophie started doing the sign for rain over and over.  And then the signs for MOMMY, RAIN.  She signed Mommy!  We were both smiling and laughing—it feels good to communicate and be heard!  She was ten months old, still in her infant sized car seat.  She couldn’t even walk yet.

After that it was a sign explosion.  She learned the signs as fast as I could, sometimes several a day.  By the time she started speaking out loud she knew hundreds of signs. Sometimes her little hands would just fly.

Luc, when he came along, learned signs too, though not as many as our very verbal Sophie. He was content with perhaps fifty.  Lots about animals, and lots about food.  Still, that’s a lot of words for a little guy.

Here he is, telling me about one of his favorite things at the time, CHICKENS!  (Make a beak with your pointer finger and peck the palm of your other hand.) He had just turned one year old.  He’s talking about the chicken on the computer screen.

And here he is asking me where Paul is (using his version of the sign for DADDY, tapping the side of his head):

He also has his other finger in his belly button, just, you know, because he can.  He is almost two in that one, so he was mixing sign and speech by then.  I wish I had more pictures of them signing.  I didn’t know it would all pass by so quickly….

But Luc’s variation of the DADDY sign brings me to an important bit about baby sign language—we started with the American Sign Language sign for words, but these often got adjusted.  For example the sign for CAT is  making imaginary whiskers on your cheek, but for Luc, who loved to talk about cats, the sign was pulling his ear.  Close, and we understood.  Or the sign for WATER, which is tapping a W on your chin, was too hard—he couldn’t make the W.  But he could tap his pointer finger on his chin.  No problem, we got the message.  The point: don’t be a stickler.  The communication is the important thing, not getting the sign ‘right.’

In fact, we often made up signs, or the kids did.  Sometimes it was by accident, for example, I used to take Sophie on walks through the woods, which, in the summer meant occasionally pulling spiderwebs off my face.  I would say “spiderweb” to explain why I had stopped walking and was making mildly upset sounds while I pulled off the web.  Sophie interpreted that to mean that  making a pulling motion in front of your face must be the sign for ’spider.’  Totally logical!  Or an aunt of ours would point to herself and say her name—so Sophie thought that pointing at her own chest was the sign for that aunt.  That one gave us a laugh when we figured it out.

Of course, idiosyncratic signing meant that sometimes I was the only one who could really tell what the signs were.  Paul and a couple of our aunts learned some signs, but it was hit or miss with the comprehension.  This is the same phenomena as moms who are the only one can really understand their kid’s ‘baby talk.’  But I was usually there, so that was fine.  I was happy to translate.

You can’t imagine the miracle of having my one year old wake up crying and be able to tell me what the problem was.  TUMMY HURT.  Or one time, SCARED TIGER.  I think that one was a scary dream.   Or, I  remember how happy they were, Sophie, in particular, to tell me about their world.  I remember a tiny Sophie crawling over to Grandma’s shoes and pointing and making the sign FLOWER over and over at Grandma’s crazy floral slippers.  Another example: I took her to a concert once when she was eighteen months and she went nuts telling me about the LIGHTS and the MUSIC and the people DANCING and the FOOD, she just wanted MORE MORE MORE!  Sophie’s always been a party girl.

I’m sure there are more resources out there now, but at the time, some books we found useful were:

Sign With Your Baby by Garcia.  I think this is the first one we got, before I knew if it would work.

Baby Sign Language Basics by Briant.  This one was fun to read with the kids.  Both the kids learned all the signs in this book doing that.

And these were the best:

Here’s a link for the first one: Baby’s First Signs by Votry.  Very appealing little books that taught us all a bunch of signs.  After a little while, the kids would ‘read’ these books to me.  We must have done these books a million times.  We still do sometimes.  The kids still remember about half the signs, and the quickly pick them back up once reminded.  I wonder if they will remember always, or if they will fade?

Beyond books about signs, we would sign any book we picked up—the kids loved the pages where there was something they could talk about.  BEAR MUSIC RAIN!  BEAR DRINK MILK!  BEAR GO OUT!  They loved that stuff.  They loved talking–that is, communicating.  Who doesn’t?  It must be so frustrating not to be able to just say what you mean.  In addition to not being able to do a damn thing for yourself—a few signs is POWER for a baby.

Convinced?  Well, here are some last thoughts if you want to try signing with a baby you know.  First, the most important thing:  never, ever, get annoyed or mad if your baby doesn’t want to make a sign. Never get frustrated. If you take their little hands and make a sign, just do it once, playfully, and don’t expect anything to come of it.  Just like playing patty cake doesn’t have expectation attached, it’s all a game.  There are no tests, there is no time table, there is no wrong.  Some kids want to talk more than other kids, which is totally fine.  No pressure, ever.  Let it just be this thing you do, and they will catch on.

Second, have faith!  Don’t give up after a couple of days or weeks.  It took several months for Sophie to start signing, but then she started signing at light speed, sometimes learning several new signs a day.

Third, don’t let people bother you with comments about, “Don’t you worry that it will delay their speech?” I must have gotten that a hundred times.  The answer is NO.  Joyful communication is the goal.  If they sign or speak it doesn’t matter as long as they are getting their message across.  They’ll switch to speech effortlessly when they can and when they want to—which they will, because they can talk to more people that way.  No worries.  Just play.

Last, it helps, of course, to learn the signs for things your baby wants to talk about.  I wouldn’t bother doing the sign for how much gas is in the tank, for example.  Hint: as far as I can tell, all babies love talking about animals.  I remember at one point I checked an ASL dictionary out from the library, but it didn’t help us much because it was full of grown-up words.  The J section, for example, had words like ‘jealously’ but no ‘jump,’ ‘joy,’ or ‘jellybean.’  On-line dictionaries were better.

Sooo… if it sounds interesting to you, don’t hesitate!  Don’t worry about feeling silly.  You will not feel silly when you are having conversations with your baby.  Our babies LOVED it.   It was incredibly useful and practical.  And even more, it was really, really FUN.

Tags: babies, sign language

Category: kiddo life