Everyone Benefits from Signing with Babies!

Before I retired from UC Davis, I was lucky enough to have a graduate student who fell in love with the research Dr. Susan Goodwyn and I had been doing for so long on the effects of signing with hearing babies. Her name is Dr. Claire Vallotton, and she is now an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University continuing her (and our) research on the topic.

I just heard from Claire the good news that one of her studies has just appeared in the professional journal, Early Childhood Research Quarterly (2012, Volume 27, pps. 401-415). The results are exciting and worth sharing here because they extend the benefits of signing beyond just middle-class families to low-income families enrolled in an Early Head Start Program in Northern California.

Why is this important? We all know that parents who have the luxury of higher education, access to parenting books and mommy-and-me classes, and progressive child care programs are eager to pursue anything that holds the promise of benefitting their kids. And this certainly includes the Baby Signs® Program. What’s more, they usually have the time and energy to follow-though on the information they receive. As a result, middle-class babies all over the world are enjoying the many benefits that signing has been proven to bring.

But what about parents who are less likely to be aware of signing and it’s benefits and less likely to have the time and energy to implement the program. Unfortunately, many low-income families fall into this category.

What Claire has done is demonstrate--with an experimental study comparing EHS families whose Home Visitors encouraged them to sign with families whose Home Visitors did not—that Early Head Start parents can be effective teachers and that both parents and children do benefit from the experience. Her specific goal, unlike the emphasis in our own research on verbal language development, was to see how signing would affect the intricacies of parent-child interactions.

So what did she find? She found that moms in the signing group were more attuned to changes in their children’s emotions and more responsive to their distress cues. In addition, the signing moms also viewed their children more positively, a benefit that reduced perceived stress. All these positive changes are important because they are critical components of a healthy “attachment” relationship—which, in turn, is a predictor of positive emotional development long term.

I can’t say that we’re surprised by these findings. In fact, we would have been surprised if she hadn’t found them. But we are definitely pleased to have them in print for the world, including policy makers, to see!

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to visit us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis
and
Co-Founder, The Baby Signs® Program

2-Month-Old Problem Solvers!

I’m taking a detour from talking about baby sign language to describe one of my favorite findings from the research literature on infant development.

Did you know that even 2-month-old babies are eager “problem solvers?” This posting provides two examples of how psychologists have determined this is so.

One way is illustrated in the photo above of my grandson, Nate, who quickly figured out that he could make the bells over his head ring by shaking his hand. He then did so purposefully and repeatedly.

Here’s another example. In a classic study, a Hungarian researcher named Hanus Papousek challenged 2-month-olds to figure out how to get a red light to come on. The babies learned the answer quickly. All it took was a slight turn of their head to the right. But that was far from the whole story.

The babies seemed thrilled at first, enthusiastically turning their heads to the right and watching the light appear. But it didn’t take long before the babies began to grow bored. At this point they slowed down, turning their heads only every now and then, as if checking to see if they were still in control of the light.

Having observed this periodic checking, Papousek surreptitiously changed the “rule” so that suddenly the babies had to turn their heads to the left to get the light to come on. As soon as one of those periodic checks revealed that a head turn to the right wouldn’t work anymore, the babies knuckled dlown and figured out the new solution to the problem. But once they had discovered that turning to the left was now the key, and once they had practiced it a number of times, they started to lose interest again.

At this point, Papousek challenged them once again, surreptitiously changing the rule again to require a head turn to the right followed by a head turn to the left. No problem! A bit of trial and error and the babies figured it out, repeated it a number of times, and then got bored again.

Here’s the point. What was actually motivating these babies to work so hard? It obviously wasn’t fascination with the red light itself or they wouldn’t have grown bored so easily. No, what kept these babies involved—even at the tender age of 2 month—was the challenge of figuring out how to get the light to come on! They truly were enjoying the experience of solving a problem and the feeling of having control over at least a tiny portion of their world!
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Happy Signing (and don’t forget to visit us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis
and
Co-Founder, The Baby Signs® Program