Families with babies frequently reported the frustration of not being able to understand what their infant or child is thinking or wanting. Baby signs enhance the ability of parents and caregivers to share simple and effective communication with their children. By effectively communicating needs such as “hunger” or “food” parents and children are able to build more meaningful relationships.
While building a meaningful relationship with your child is a paramount building block for their development and your families growth, here are 3 other benefits that come with using baby signs.
Motor Skills
Sign language helps in the development of fine motor skills. Because of the dexterity required for communicating with hand gestures, the small muscles needed to communicate grow over time. While these muscles strengthen both fine and gross motor skills improve.
Communication
While we may think of language as simply the spoken words, there is much more that is involved. Integrating Baby Signs early helps children improve other important aspects of language such as body, facial, and emotional language. Studies have shown that people who can sign have improved abilities to read general body language. For nonverbal children sign language helps communicate emotions. This aspect of communication for nonverbal children helps them express their emotions in words easily while still giving a voice to their feelings.
School
Children who are exposed to baby signs early in life reap benefits later while excelling in school. Children who use or understand sign language show stronger abilities in improved spelling skills. This skill stems from the imprinting of words on the brain through fingerspelling. In fact, using fine motor skills to speak through sign language translates muscle memory to spelling and oral memory.
In addition to improved spelling, a child's vocabulary vastly improves both early and through life. Similarly to how a child's ability to spell is imprinted on their brain, the same is true for when a word is heard and seen (through sign language) it leaves a stronger imprint on the brain.
Lastly, when sign language is incorporated into a hearing classroom, teachers are finding that they have better classroom management due to the reduced interruptions due to improved simple communication through signs. When a classroom is well managed, students' behavior improves both in the class and at home.
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