Parenting Toddlers

When Zoey (9) was about 5 months old, I discovered Baby Signs by Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn. I took their advice and began signing with Zoey, but I wanted to be sure she was learning American Sign Language (ASL) rather than made up signs.

Shortly after graduating from high school, I worked as a teacher’s aide for a group that taught swimming lessons to children with special needs. I learned that there are a variety of reasons a person may require sign language to communicate, and it is not always because they are deaf or hard of hearing. I wanted my child to be able to communicate with them and that could only happen if they spoke the same language.

Unfortunately, Zoey had a language disorder that prevented her from understanding and communicating in sign language. My next child, Keenan (7), was able to understand sign language by 6 months old and was using it himself by 8 months old. We communicate well through ASL until he was speaking full sentences at 2.5 years old. Drew (4) was able to understand when we signed with her, but until she was 2.5 years old, she was unable to use sign language because of the way her speech impairment affected her ability to communicate using her hands.

Once Keenan and Drew were signing, though, we were able to communicate with them before their speech abilities developed. Keenan was also a very obedient baby so I could allow him to travel across the room during meetings because all I had to do was snap my fingers to catch his attention then sign to him and he would obey. Because Drew understood sign, I could have done the same but she was a loud, “mind of her own” baby and would do whatever she wanted regardless of what said to her in sign.

The ability to communicate before your infant or toddler can form the words in speech is one of the primary benefits of signing with your toddler. I never ceases to amaze me how much our very young children know and understand but are unable to communicate it to us.

Because Keenan could communicate so well with us, he rarely threw tantrums.

Some people worry that teaching our infants and toddlers to sign will delay speech, but the opposite is true. It enhances language development at a very early age.

You do not need to be fluent in ASL to teach your toddler how to sign. Begin wit 2-3 signs and add more as you go. As you practice and use them daily with your toddler, you both will naturally expand your repertoire of signs. I began with few signs I already knew and built up from there.

Don’t expect perfection. Continue to model the correct sign but accept whatever variation of the sign your baby or toddler can do. Just as they learn to talk with partial words, they will sign with partial signs. As they grow and mature, they learn how to speak properly and the same is true of signing.

How well do my children sign now? My children now know 200+ signs and we are now learning together how to build sentences when signing. Not all of Drew’s speech is 100% clear so she clarifies with signs.

Tomorrow I will write about the benefits of signing to bridge the language gap in adoption. I will share how signing benefited my son whom we adopted in Haiti almost two years ago at the age of 5 and the experience my sister is having with her daughter, whom she adopted in China this summer at the age of 2.

For more information and resources, visit the Signing Time! website. You can purchase videos, board books, flash cards, and posters and they have forums where you can talk to other parents who are signing with their children.

© Copyright 2007 Rebecca Wilson. All Rights Reserved.
Used with permission.

Photo credit: Lifeprint Institute 

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