Does Baby Signing Help Develop Baby’s Brain?

Young Babies are excellent at copying hand and facial gestures. They love the interaction and they delight in the reactions they get!

A couple were sitting in a restaurant with their children.

The oldest pointed out a painting of a ship leaving its berth. At the rail were dozens of people waving to their loved ones ashore.  It sparked a conversation about why people wave goodbye and that led to a discussion of other hand gestures.

When you think about it we use them all the time to reinforce and emphasize our spoken word.  There are masses of signs that we use instinctively, a stern finger to our lips to hush, or a cupped hand to the ear to invite a shout.

In recent times this process has been studied and a standardized set of signs have been developed that can rapidly advance the development of our abilities. You can use baby sign language even before the baby has begun learning to speak. In fact it makes sense to do so.

Show a baby how to express themselves through signing and they will quickly use it to tell mommy what is wanted.  This helps to reduce crying and the tantrums that we all dread.

Put in a nutshell – if you and your baby use signs then baby’s brain is stimulated. Therefore it develops. Then baby progresses to other techniques and so speaks.

It has been said that we have two ears and one mouth and should use them in that order, meaning that we should listen twice as much as we speak! However much we proportion listening to speaking it is wrong to entirely dismiss hand gestures, as 90% of information is conveyed by body language.

When we teach speech we only involve the ears and the mouth. This is considered to be left brain work. When we combine this with baby signing we add hand coordination.This introduces visual acuity and the entire other half of the brain!

This is not the end of these advantages either. Having started to learn with both sides of the brain baby will continue. Signing babies can learn to read far earlier. Because there is already a connection between the eyes and the meaning of a word, there is also a trusted process. This routine of seeing, processing and storing is the natural platform that we all use to develop reading skills.

So get to it Teach baby to sign!

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