Talking hands help babies overcome tantrums (From St Albans & Harpenden Review)

Talking hands help babies overcome tantrums

10:00am Monday 20th February 2006

• Print
• Email
• Share

EVERY parent of a child who has not yet learned to talk will have felt frustration at not knowing what their child wants and has probably wished for a magic formula to stop the tantrums that ensue.

Sign language may seem a strange solution, but an increasing number of parents around the world are turning to this form of communication to learn what their children really need, rather than playing a tiring guessing game.

The idea came about in the US in the 1970s after interpreter Joseph Garcia noticed that hearing children of deaf parents who used sign language started communicating with their parents much earlier than children of hearing parents.

After extensive research Garcia found that babies who were regularly and consistently exposed to signs at six to seven months old began communicating by their eighth or ninth month.

The number of people attending Katja O'Neill's Signing Babies classes in Hertfordshire is proof of the success of signing.

The mother-of-three holds classes in St Albans, Harpenden and Hatfield, where children learn the first steps in "talking" with their hands, using Garcia's Sign With Your Baby programme.

Far from having a structured educational feel, the classes are like a playgroup with an extra dimension. The parents and their children sit in a circle and are welcomed by Katja and her puppet, Signing Sam, before singing nursery rhymes accompanied by signs for certain repeated words.

"We put signing to nursery rhymes but we are mainly teaching the parents," says Katja, who has worked as a pre-school music teacher for seven years.

"The mums take the knowledge home with them and sign as often as possible with their babies. That's where they really learn to sign."

But could learning to communicate through signing adversely affect speech development?

Not according to research funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the US, which found that babies who learnt to sign understood more words, had larger vocabularies and engaged in more sophisticated play than non-signing babies.

Katja says: "People worry that it might delay speech, but babies who can sign actually have enhanced speech development.

"This is because they are learning about communication and more connections are being formed in the brain."

Babies start off learning the signs for "milk", "food", "more" and "all gone", and move on to the signs for family names, bathtime and nappy signs.

As the classes progress they learn signs for animals, toys and things in the outside world, and some of Katja's pupils have learnt 50 or more signs.

Lisa Hodgkins, mother of Anna, two, and Tom, four, said she has seen the benefits signing can have for families.

She said: "As a mum, you always have to go through the top three things your child could want, because they can't tell you themselves.

"But Anna is potty training so she is using the sign for that and she learnt to sign that she was hungry or that she wanted a drink.

"You need to do the signing a lot at home for it to work, but it's great to bring them along to a class that's musical and educational as well."

To find out more about Signing Babies visit www.signingbabies.co.uk visit or telephone Katja on 01707 695141.

• Print
• Email
• Share