Baby Sign question answered

I received the following question via my Facebook group, a day in the Peas Pod. Please feel free to join me there is you'd like to follow our daily lives.

My 2nd girl is 15months now, and knows what she wants! My sister says you used baby sign with Curious George. She knows a few basic signs that I got from a book. Too late to teach her more? What resources did you use? Our home language is Afrikaans but my older girl is bilingual. Do you think that will be more difficult for little one to adjust? Thought I'd pick your brain, though porridge brain might interfere:)

Thanks so much for your question, I love being able to help out where ever I can. I hope you don't mind if I answer your question on my blog. I think it's a great question and others may benefit from the answer.

I would highly recommend baby sign. We are truly seeing the benefits now. It was really fantastic that he was able to communicate his needs to us when he was in the hospital in traction with his broken leg. At the moment he tells anyone who will listen the story of his leg - he makes the sign for ball and says ba ba, then he says bick (his word for fall over) and then he makes the sign for broken (which we made up for him) and points to his leg. So you can see that at 21 mnths he is using a combination of signs, words and sounds.

I definitely don't think it's too late for your daughter to learn baby sign at 15mnths. She will probably learn the signs quite quickly once she realises that they help get her what she wants. CG learnt the sign for broken after my showing him just three times. Every child is different so I would just suggest trying some signs and seeing how you go.

We used Baby Signing Time DVDs, which you can read more about in my Baby Signing Time post. The DVDs are in English but there are many other Baby Signing time resources you could use that you could translate; there are apps with the flash cards and there is a blog which has some of the signs on it. I also Googled some signs, which Baby Sign didn't include, using an American Sign language website called Signing Savvy and then just showed CG the signs myself. This is how he learnt the signs for some of our African animals like hippo, lion, giraffe etc.

As long as you are consistent in using the sign every time you say the word and saying the word every time your child does the sign then you should be able to teach any words you like. At first I was against teaching CG general words like train or car. I didn't want to stunt his speech at all and only wanted to use the Baby Sign to help him communicate his needs. So I didn't re enforce these words beyond what he saw on the DVD. However he picked them up on his own without me repeating them during the day and started using them himself to communicate. He was so excited that he was able to 'talk' to us and tell us about the things he saw around him that in the end we just went with the extra vocab as well. His ability to communicate his needs, feelings and thoughts astounds me each day. Of course we are really the only ones who can understand him at this point but I suppose this would be the same if he was using grunts and sounds like other little ones do.

We have heard some people's concerns that we will stunt his speech development because he is not being forced to speak to make himself understood. My opinion on this is two fold.

1. At this age and stage of development what they are really developing is the ability to communicate. I am not worried about what form the communication takes as long as his ability to do so is being developed. Words will come in their own time. Just like crawling leads to walking. Every child moves through the movement milestones in a unique manner but all (except a rare few) will walk and then run. As long as I am not concerned about comparing my son to other children of the same age (which as you know is never a good idea anyway) then I see no issue with the actual spoken words coming a little later if that ends up being the case. However we have already watched him drop many signs in exchange for the words. After all every one understands the words but only mom and dad get the sign. When he starts to speak in earnest I am confident that his vocabulary and ability to express himself will be far more advanced than if he had not had baby sign. I'll keep you posted.

2. One of the key reasons for communication is to have ones' needs met. I would rather have an himself understood. CG has even made up some of his own signs for things and people to get his point across. Just as other children might say woof woof for dog before they actually say dog.

In the end I think you could quite easily teach her some signs in Afrikaans the sign wouldn't matter as long as she understood the meaning and more importantly that you are able to understand her. I'd try some signs and see how you do. It will take some repetition before you see any results so I'd give her at least two weeks. In the end if it doesn't help you won't have done any harm (her ever expanding brain will simply kill off the synapses for the signs as it learns other things) but if it works your life may suddenly become much much easier.