Teach Your Child Sign Language
Your child will understand and want to share ideas and requests with you long before he can actually speak the words. The gap between when a child and a young child know what they want but cannot effectively communicate it to you is frustrating for everyone involved.
But the solution that parents found effective (and has grown in popularity over the past couple of decades) is to teach them to speak with their hands first – sign language. Parents.com explains why teaching sign language is so beneficial:
“Using sign language with your child gives you the opportunity to see into their thoughts, which helps strengthen your bond,” says Michelle Macias, M.D., chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) section of developmental and behavioral pediatrics. Signing can also reduce frustration (and tantrums) caused by your child’s inability to express their needs. And it might even make your child smarter. Research has shown that babies who were taught sign language had more vocabulary at 12 months than those who were not taught.
How and when to start
You can start using the toddler signs as soon as you want. However, in reality , according to the AAP, trends show that if you start signing a baby at 6-7 months, they will start using them on their own at 8-9 months. To effectively teach omens, use them regularly, daily. Showing them the sign once is unlikely to be enough for the lesson to take hold. Repetition is the key to success.
There are many books, websites, and YouTube tutorials out there to help you get started with the basic signs you want to teach your child. BabySignLanguage.com has a printed sign language chart that you can hang on your refrigerator to reinforce them and remind you to use them regularly. But as an introduction to a new sign, I find it helpful to first see how someone is using it. This is a great quick video of some of the signs my husband and I found most helpful to get started when our son was an infant:
It’s about seven minutes long, and she teaches viewers a few solid starting cues, including “yet,” “it’s done,” “milk,” “bed,” and “wait.” As you continue to add words to your sign language repertoire, there are tons of other guides you can search for on YouTube if there is a specific word you want to learn.
What words should you focus on?
There is no reason to force yourself to learn sign language for everything . It might be interesting to teach them to distinguish between red and green, but to get the most out of the process, the AAP recommends starting with words that “are most meaningful or serve to describe. what your child most often sees, does or wants. “
To begin with, they compiled a list of words and phrases that babies might most want to convey: airplane, baby, ball, bird, blanket, book, cat, cup, cold, daddy, diaper, dog, ready, drink, eat, go, calm nights, happy, help, hot, painful, I love you, milk, mommy, still, slumbering, no, outside, please sit down, sleep, star, thanks, get up, water.
But don’t forget to keep talking
Signing keywords and concepts for your child is not a substitute for verbal language – you should always speak a word and sign it at the same time to heighten its meaning. The AAP says that “as long as gesticulation does not replace conversation, it will not prevent your child from learning to speak not only with his hands, but also with words.”
And be sure to also share the key clues with your child’s other caregivers or loved ones so that they can communicate and be understood when you are not with them.