Reduce your frustration and boost their language skills by using sign language to connect with your child, writes Claire O'Connell
How often do parents look on in anguish as they try to work out what their crying baby or young toddler needs? Imagine how much easier it would be if pre-verbal children could tell us exactly what is on their minds.
Some parents are now bypassing the guesswork by teaching hearing babies to use simple sign language. As well as getting the message across and reducing the immediate frustration, using symbolic gestures can boost a young child's ability to learn spoken language and may even lay the foundations for reading skills later on.
"Signing with babies provides a way for them to communicate before they can say words," says Dr Linda Acredolo, professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis, and co-author of Baby Signs, a book that explains the benefits of signing and outlines how to get started.
She and fellow author, psychologist Dr Susan Goodwyn, were first inspired to study symbolic gestures in the early 1980s when Acredolo's 12-month-old daughter repeatedly made a sniffing gesture when she saw a flower. "She was pointing at a rose and sniffing and it doesn't take a nuclear scientist to figure out what she had in mind," says Acredolo.
They interviewed other parents and found that most babies use gestures as a natural part of language development. For example, a child might pant to indicate a dog or make a doorknob-turning gesture to signal she wants to go out. But parents tended not to encourage this signing because they felt it would delay the child's speech development.
"We heard this time after time," says Acredolo. "So a major goal of our research was to find out whether that was true or not."
They tracked 140 families over two years and found that children who were encouraged to sign as babies were consistently ahead of their non-signing peers in language skills, and by age three the baby signers were talking more like four-year olds.
They followed up and found that at age eight, the signers still had a linguistic edge on their peers. Now pilot data from 12-year-olds suggests that baby signing may help reading skills too, says Acredolo.
"But that's not the reason why we think people should do the signing," she adds.
"It's really the social and emotional benefits to the family that make the difference. We hate being billed as one of those better-baby gimmicks."
According to Acredolo, baby signing is just an extension of what parents do naturally with their children. "It's the same way you teach 'bye bye'," she says. "You move your own hand emphatically and say 'bye bye', it's the same thing with any of the signs."
Acredolo and Goodwyn recommend that parents start with one or two basic gestures for words such as 'eat' or 'more' as situations crop up in normal activities like mealtimes. The trick is to slowly introduce new signs in context while saying the words, focusing on subjects that spark the child's interest and encouraging the child to make up their own signs too.
Acredolo says most children begin to grasp the concept from around six months and start signing back around their first birthday, often using between 10 and 20 signs which peter out as their speech comes in. "It's a fascinating window into their minds that you would never have otherwise," she says, noting that this early communication can also help to head off or lessen toddler tantrums.
Gillean Guy started signing when her daughter, Laura, was nine months old. "People on parenting websites were talking about the benefits and the fun of signing so I decided to try it," says Guy, a Dublin businesswoman.
At first she met sceptical reactions. "I was slagged to death because it was so alien to be signing to a baby who didn't have hearing difficulties," she recalls. But Laura silenced the critics shortly after her first birthday by building up a vocabulary of around 10 signs including 'milk', 'more' and 'hurt'.
"It's only when you start teaching them the signs that you realise they know exactly what they want to say," says Guy, who is currently training to become an instructor and hopes to run baby signing workshops for parents in the autumn.
Speech and language therapist Ruth Duffy began signing to her three-month-old son, Dáire, at just six weeks. "It is like laying a foundation, you're just setting them up," she says. She hopes it will ultimately facilitate his language skills.
"Gesture and symbolic communication is going to help a child's language development later on because they are mapping what they are seeing and hearing and relating it to the here and now," she explains. "For example if I'm finished washing his face, he sees the sign for 'all done' and the facecloth disappears and doesn't come back again."
Despite the proven benefits to language development, there is still a misconception that using sign language will hamper a child's ability to speak, according to Julianne Gillen, who works with the National Association for Deaf People and lectures at Trinity College Dublin's Centre for Deaf Studies.
Gillen, who is profoundly deaf, says she encountered well-meaning but negative reactions when she started signing to her infant son, Callan, eight years ago, but any fears about his spoken vocabulary were unfounded. "When he was three years old I brought him to be assessed," she says. "The nurse asked him 'What colour is the dragon, is it blue or green?'" He said, "Neither, it's aqua-marine."
Gillen, who now signs to her seven-month-old daughter Théa, is fluent in Irish Sign Language (ISL), but she believes parents who want to try baby signing should not worry about getting the signs exactly right.
"It doesn't matter if it's not the proper sign, the important thing is that you communicate with your child and that you use the sign consistently," she says.
"I would encourage any parent who is considering signing to have a go."