Children often develop their motor skills faster than their speech. Yet, before their speech development, they will always need to express how they feel. Crying was one of the major ways they did this and then came the smiles at intervals as they grew and got used to the people and things around them.
To foster a better understanding of what they felt and how to help their parents and caregivers attend to them, baby sign language was introduced–an avenue for babies to communicate as they adjusted to the world around them.
If baby sign language truly helps communication with your child, I guess it’s only fair for you to wonder in what ways exactly. That’s the essence of this article–to show you some ways by which communication with your child is improved with baby sign language.
Five Ways You Can Tell That Communication Has Taken Place
Communication is not complete if the following processes haven’t been undergone by the parties involved
- Active Listening
- Clear Understanding & assimilation of the Message(s) passed across the parties
- Response Formulating
- Transmitting Response
- Getting Feedback and Clarification
These processes listed above apply to adult-adult and adult-child communication. It’s good to know that baby sign language does not bypass any of these processes, although, with the language, the adult in the adult-child relationship has to do most of the work to ensure effective communication.
Ways by Which Baby Sign Language Improves Communication with Your Child
Image by Jeremy Yewdalll on Openverse
The Benefit of Early Communication
That you are certain of communicating with your child quite earlier than you normally would, should you have to wait for your child’s first coherent speech, is automatically an improvement to parent-child communication and something that should not be taken for granted.
Sometimes, early communication can be one of the links that foster a longtime bond between a child and their parents or caregivers.
Your Child Finds it Easy to Learn Multiple Languages
Because you have taken your baby through the process of learning baby sign language which might successfully progress to ASL as you desire, it can be a lot easier to teach that child other languages.
According to a demographics of multilingual children, it was discovered that in Canada, about 15.6% of kids between ages 0 to 4 years are multilingual. A baby’s brain is already about half the size of an adult’s brain in the first year. This shows that they are capable of grasping information more than we realize and can learn multiple languages if given the chance and taught properly. With this comes the advantage of communicating with your child in many ways (languages).
Your Child Let’s Go Off Tantrums
Tantrums hamper communication. Children who resort to tantrums have a false belief that with it comes the ability for them to get their parent’s attention and in turn what they desire. But their baby minds are unable to fathom why when tantrums get their parent’s attention, they don’t get what they want as easily as they anticipated. Instead, their parents or caregivers who may or may not succumb to their needs are first irritated and also frustrated.
When you have an infant who can use baby sign language, you can take them through channeling their frustration and anger the right way–which is the ‘sign way.’
Baby sign language can help you insist that your child no longer gets your attention with tantrums but through sign language allowing no room for any more frustration on your part and theirs.
Your Child Gets More Confident
You might be wondering what self-confidence has to do with communicating with your child. The answer is, ‘everything.’ The more confident your child gets, the more precisely they can communicate their needs. It takes away the confusion about what they want per time and makes communicating with them direct and easy. In the end, it saves time.
Your Child’s Motor Skills Are Enhanced
There’s no doubt that this point is as confusing as the last but let’s hope you don’t leave here more confused than you came. The thing is that–because baby sign language like every other sign language uses a lot of hand gestures, it has a way of strengthening your child’s motor skills. With this strength in their motor skills comes an eager child who’s eager to use their hands to explore. With exploring comes independence and independence like self-confidence fosters communication. Your child is eager to take initiative and this has nothing to do with magic, rather, it is a simple advantage of baby sign language.
Your Child Develops Empathy
Having established that with baby sign language comes fewer tantrums, your child begins to grasp how to get what he or she wants without hurting others. This is a sign of empathy–the desire to make others happy as you are happy.
It’s the responsibility of parents and caregivers to consciously pay close attention to this shift in behavior and understand this growth in a child. This observation in turn creates a better platform for communication between parents and their children.
Your Child Has Easier Vocabulary Development
How do you feel when you come across an infant who has a word(s) for almost every situation? Amused, right? Although it’s well known that baby sign language gives your child a form of expression, another thing it does is that it makes them aware of things they might have waited longer to be aware of without sign language.
This awareness forms the standard by which they develop their vocabularies before they get to say even one word. As this development takes place, you are more comfortable wanting to know what your child thinks of the various things around them.
Conclusion
A constantly happy child is a testament to good parenting. Therefore, as evident from the ways baby sign language improves communication with your child, we can say that baby sign language helps to make for a happy child–a child with little tantrums, more self-confidence, and general cognitive reasoning.
You can allow your doubts about baby sign language end today. Utilize its benefits and if you aren’t familiar with sign language yourself, learning ASL with the resources made available by SignBee Academy is a good place to start.
The best parent-teachers of baby sign language are those who can use sign language (ASL) themselves.
Thumbnail Photo Credit to: Image by Ian Bc North on Openverse
