Sign Language = Fewer Tears

Holden, Mike, and I have become big fans of sign language over the last few months. It's made so much of our daily life easier. Even though Holden's been learning both signs and words at about the same rate recently, the signs have proven helpful as points of clarification. And apparently at daycare they've been incredibly useful as well: his teacher reported him using "help" recently, in addition to his collection of "mores" and "pleases." According to a recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, sign language can continue to be useful into the terrible twos. The ability to make their needs known can simply lead to fewer tears. And as a blogger on babble.com notes, signs also help with language development.

So why signs instead of just words? As the Inquirer article notes, babies' tongue and mouth muscles don't develop as quickly as hand muscles, so even if they can understand words they can only vocalize them in a basic way (or not at all) when they are young. Signs are a way for them to fill in the communication gap. Admittedly, some signs are also too hard for them to make at a young age, but they can--and do--create their own primitive versions of them. For example, the sign for water (using the "w" sign tapped against your chin) is hard to do:
But Holden adjusts by putting his open fingers against chin saying "wa wa." (For more pictures of signs like these see www.babies-and-sign-language.com.) Banana is also very hard to do, but Holden's managed to create a version of it that's easy to understand. Incidentally, these are all ASL signs. The benefit of using ASL signs, instead of some kind of invented 'baby' signs, is that they are widely known and can be easily used at daycare and later in life.

So here's an incomplete list of some of signs that Holden knows:
-more
-milk
-water
-cup/drink (we use it to ask if he's thirsty)
-eat (used to see if he's hungry)
-book (he now verbalizes this one instead)
-banana (this is the only food we've done, we're working on more soon!)
-please
-help
-all done
-up
-"itsy bitsy spider" (not an ASL sign per se, it's just his favorite song!)