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| A drawing showing a person signing "butterfly" in baby sign language. Image source. |
I have 2 little kids. The younger one is a toddler and is learning all kinds of new things, including some baby sign language.
What is baby sign language? The way I heard it explained was, before babies are able to talk, learning some signs can help them communicate. The signs for baby sign language are pretty similar to American Sign Language, with some of them simplified to make it easier for babies. It's very easy to look these up on YouTube, just search "pig baby sign language" if you want to learn the sign for "pig", and so on.
American Sign Language is an actual language. With a grammar and everything. Baby sign language is not. Baby sign language is just some words.
A few years ago, when my first child was a baby, I learned a bunch of signs for foods and toys and various things, and tried to consistently make the signs while talking to him. I did that a lot but I don't remember him ever responding by signing back. So uh I guess that failed. (But now he speaks both English and Chinese fluently so I guess he turned out okay.)
(Well, also I have a full-time job, so I wasn't with him for most of the day, and the other adults in his life weren't doing baby sign language with him.)
For my second kid, I wasn't really showing her signs intentionally. But when she was around 18 months, we noticed that she was copying the hand motions from different songs that people would sing to her. We noticed that she's really good at associating a song with a hand gesture. She constantly demands that I sing specific songs to her, by gesturing. Oh my goodness, it's so adorable how she makes a little flower shape with her hands when she wants me to sing "Edelweiss." (Or, for some songs, she says a word, like if she says "ro ro" it means she wants to hear "Row Row Row Your Boat." Or she roars ferociously when she wants me to sing Katy Perry's "Roar." [Fact check: She is a small child and is not anywhere near as ferocious as she imagines.])
So after I realized that she's good at learning signs, I decided I should do more baby sign language with her.
I think my problem before was that I conceptualized this as a really all-or-nothing thing. I thought it was like, during their first phase of life, the baby can't talk or do signs. And then, the next phase- I read on the internet that babies might start doing signs at 8 months, if you're been consistently showing them the signs for a while- so during this phase they do baby sign language, and they don't talk. And then the next phase of development is when the baby talks, and there's no need for baby sign language any more. As if there's a clear line between when the baby "can't talk" and "can talk", and baby sign language is only useful during the "can't talk" phase.
For my little daughter, it's not like that at all. She's learning to talk- she can say a bunch of words, some of them English and some of them Chinese (and a few that she just made up herself)- and that's going great, and the baby sign language can supplement it. Some words are too hard for her to say when she's this little, but she can definitely learn a sign for them. And there are plenty of words she can already say, like "mama", so we're not doing baby sign language with those.
So it's like, a way to help her out while she's learning to talk. So she can communicate, even about things that she's not able to pronounce yet. And the more she can communicate, the better- she's getting to that age where she's starting to have her own opinions, and she often tries to tell us what she wants, and it's hard to understand sometimes.
This all sounds great, but in practice I haven't really done a lot yet. Like I said, I have a full-time job. She can definitely learn more signs, it's just a matter of me thinking of a word that might be of interest to her, and looking up the sign on the internet, and then signing it with her enough times that she'll understand what it means.
This could also be a good way to sort of bridge the gap between English and Chinese. She has some people in her life who speak English with her, and some who speak Chinese- maybe the baby sign language can be something that both sides will be able to understand.
Anyway, I'll just finish this post by telling you about how cute it is when she does the sign for "butterfly." The sign for "butterfly" is you cross your hands and hook your thumbs together to make a butterfly, and flap your fingers a little bit. She doesn't quite get the sign right- she just crosses her arms in front of her chest, Wakanda-forever-style, and curls the fingers on one hand in and out. Oh my goodness it's so cute.
The other day I saw her flipping through the book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," and when she got to the page with the surprise twist ending where the caterpillar turns into a butterfly [spoiler warning, I guess], she looked at the picture and then crossed her arms and did the sign for butterfly. She also knows the sign for "caterpillar," and when we read that book together, she does the caterpillar sign and then the butterfly sign at the end. It's just the most adorable thing. You can tell she knows many things. Many thoughts in her little head.
Anyway, my point is, baby sign language can be a useful tool! Don't stress about it if you feel like "oh, I haven't done enough, oh, we should have done more"- you can use it a little or a lot, it's no big deal.
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