How Little Hands Can Help

Back in August, as a break from writing about baby sign language, I wrote about the idea of “chores” for young children. The point I made there was that it’s the smart parent who takes advantage of the toddler’s natural desire to “help” by letting him or her do so and then consciously rewarding even feeble efforts in that direction. The goal is to get young children in the habit of cooperating.

There are lots of advantages to having young children help out besides the (sometimes marginal) benefit of not having to do all the work yourself. Having children contribute to the work of a household teaches them a wide variety of valuable lessons:

• Keeps them from feeling entitled to be waited on.
• Makes them aware of how much work it is to keep a household functioning, thereby making them more appreciative of the contributions of others.
• Makes them feel part of the family “team.”
• Teaches specific skills (e.g., carrying dishes carefully, sorting clothes, etc.)
• Strengthens self-esteem by eliciting praise from parents.

But, you may be thinking, can really little ones actually do? Here are some ideas:
• Use a hand vacuum or small broom to clean up crumbs (see photo!)
• Add water and food to pet bowls
• Water plants outside (with a watering can or spray bottle)
• Help you move wet clothes from the washer to the dryer
• Put newspapers in the recycle container
• Transfer groceries from bags to a shelf or table.
• Put placemats on the table and napkins at each place (and maybe silverward)
• Carry dishes (a few at a time) to the kitchen
• Pull blankets up neatly on their beds and tuck pajamas away
• Exercise the dog by playing fetch with ball, stick, or frisbee

And of course, the old favorite, put their toys away at bedtime!

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

Troublesome “Tips”

A parent forwarded to me postings from a blog about signing with babies (www.babysignlanguagenow.com) that has been popping up frequently in Google “Alerts.” I’m usually delighted to see increased dissemination of information about the topic; the more parents we can reach the better! In this case, however, the specific advice offered is in so many instances contrary to our own observations here at Baby Signs about what works—as well as contrary to good developmental practice—that I felt it would be important to point out our concerns by highlighting the post entitled “When Baby Signs Back: Factors that Affect.”

Question posed: Why are there individual differences in how long it takes for a baby to start signing back? (“…how long [before] their baby [will] sign back.”)

(1). “Those babies who have better IQ are more likely to learn different signs earlier in life. So, the general rule is the stronger the mental capabilities of your baby are, the earlier he will sign back to you.”

CONCERN: There is no data that supports such an assertion. Nor could there be given all the factors totally unrelated to mental ability that we know contribute: (a) Individual differences in the priority babies have for communicating are really important. For example, some babies would rather climb the bookshelves than read the books. (b) Age: The younger the baby is when you start modeling signs, the longer it will take. (c) How much signing the child sees.

(2). “The earlier you start teaching sign language, the earlier you get results. The recommended age to start teaching baby sign language is 4 months.”

CONCERN: If the question is, as the beginning of the post states, how long before a baby begins signing back, the answer is the younger the baby, the longer it will take. There’s certainly nothing wrong with starting early. However, the chance that a parent will get discouraged and quit is greater. That’s why we suggest between 9 and 12 months.

(3) “The more dedication you show, the more organized your teaching is, the more chances that your baby will learn baby sign language earlier in life.

CONCERN: Although this sounds like our point about the amount of signing a baby sees, the bit about organized teaching implies the importance of specific lesson times. In fact, in another posting, the author calls for “teaching sessions” where you try to “eliminate all the distractions around you” including “random noises and other persons” and rewarding the baby “with food and toys whenever he takes a successful step in the process of learning baby sign language.” In sharp contrast, our 30 years of observation and research indicate that simply incorporating signs into everyday routines and activities with your baby is the best way to go. Regimented lesson times in isolation from others, in fact, can be off-putting and counter-productive—and an excited reaction by Mom or Dad is usually reward enough! You’re not teaching a dog to roll over.

(4) “Whether it is a matter of lack of nutrition or encouragement, anything that hampers the mental development of your baby will also slow down the learning process.”

CONCERN: Of course, anything truly injurious to a child’s physical or psychological welfare will affect the child’s developmental timeline in a wide variety of domains. However, most parents who consult a blog like this already know that nutrition and encouragement are important. And the downside to the statement is the focus, once again, on “mental capabilities.”

This list covers just one of the postings. The others have problems, too--like the advice to “use flash cards to show the babies the proper ways to sign” as if babies could learn from a static image better than a real life demonstration!

After three full decades observing and conducting research on the topic of signing with babies, I feel so passionate about it that I think it’s important to set the record straight when parents are being led astray. The last thing we need is for the movement to get a bad reputation from an influx of really bad advice.

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

The Baby Signs® Program: An Intervention Before Parents Even Know There is a Need

Over the years Dr. Susan Goodwyn, co-founder with me of the Baby Signs® Program, and I have received emails from Baby Signs® Instructors, from parents, and even from our academic colleagues, all commenting on the potential benefits not just of signing, but specifically of the Baby Signs® Program, for autistic children and urging us to take a closer look. Given the severe problems so many autistic children have with verbal language, we believed they were right, but it was the following email in particular from a Baby Signs® Instructor that caused us to really sit up and take notice. Here’s what she told us:

“I got a call from someone who teaches autistic children. She thanked me for teaching the Baby Signs® Program and shared that she uses signs with the older kids she works with and it really helps them. She went on to say that our teaching signs to parents of babies is a wonderful thing for autistic children because parents often do not get a diagnosis until they are older, so they are getting some intervention before they even know there is a problem.”

What startled us into action was the insight that by teaching young babies to sign, we are providing parents of autistic children “…some intervention before they even know there is a problem.” With this email as the inspiration, we’ve put together a list of research based findings about autism and reasons why we believe the Baby Signs® Program (BSP), including our DVD-based potty training program, holds the promise of being especially beneficial to families with autistic children, both before and after they are diagnosed.

• FINDING: A teaching method in which sign and word are paired together is especially valuable because it provides information that will be needed by autistic children who turn out to be capable of moving on to verbal communication.
BSP: Our program instructs adults to always pair the word with the sign when modeling for children with the goal of fostering verbal language. What’s more, our federally-funded research with non-special-needs children indicates it works.

• FINDING: Research indicates that autistic children do learn important things from video presentations; in fact, some research even suggests they learn more easily from video than from live demonstrations.
BSP: Our program offers a wide variety of extremely high-quality DVDs designed to directly teach important signs while they entertain. Children simply LOVE these DVDs.

• FINDING: Autistic children benefit from repetition and routines.
BSP: Because repetition is the key to success with all young children, our DVDs provide lots of repetition of the signs by real babies and our animated DiaperDoodle characters. The fact that children enjoy them so much that they ask to watch them over and over is an added plus.

• FINDING: Autistic children can be a particular challenge to potty train because they can’t communicate effectively and often aren’t motivated to please their parents or respond to social reinforcement.
BSP: Our potty training DVD is designed specifically to teach the potty routine (which appeals to autistic kids) and 5 potty-time signs (which provides necessary communication) through lots of repetition and modeling by the DiaperDoodles, our animated characters.

• FINDING: When they first hear about signing with children, many adults are intimidated and fear that it will take too much learning on their part.
BSP: Baby Signs® resources and classes make learning easy and fun for parents, teachers, and child care professionals.

Visit www.babysigns.com for more information about Baby Signs® resources

to help you and your baby enjoy all the benefits that signing can bring.

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

Making Letter Learning Fun

Today I’m taking a break from talking about baby sign language to provide a simple tip to support the earliest steps in learning to read. Here’s a fun, creative way to help your child begin to recognize the various curves and contours that distinguish the letters of the alphabet from one another. (By the way, this idea comes from my book, with Dr. Susan Goodwyn, called Baby Minds

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Simply start with an uppercase letter. Draw the letter, for example, an A, on a piece of paper, and say something like the following: “Here’s an A. What do you think we could make out of an A?” Be creative and transform the letter into a silly picture—perhaps of a clown as in the drawing included here. Draw it again and transform it into stick-figure person or house. Ask your child for other suggestions.

Begin with about three letters, and play the game for a couple of weeks with only these letters. You can compose many different drawings with each individual letter. Then begin to add a new letter to the familiar set. This is a great game to play while waiting in a restaurant for your food to be served because there will always be lots of napkins or place mats at your disposal.

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

Crafty Ways to Sneak in Math Principles

Today, I'm taking a detour from baby sign language to share some fun information from the book I co-authored with Dr. Susan Goodwyn, Baby Minds.

Given the choice, almost all of us, no matter our age, would choose to play a game or bake cookies or fly a paper airplane rather than sit down in front of a teacher for a formal lesson in math basics. Fortunately, savvy parents can take advantage of these more enjoyable activities—and others—to help their young children start appreciating the principles behind numbers, shapes, and even fractions. Here are some examples:

• Board Games: Old favorites like “Chutes & Ladders” and “Candyland” require children to recognize the number when they spin the pointer and then to count off squares. In doing so, they practice the sequence of number names and get a concrete lesson in the quantity that each number represents. The added benefit is that the child is highly motivated to pay attention, not only to the number squares she moves but also to any mistakes her partner might make. As a result, a single game of Chutes & Ladders can yield a total of 30 or more lessons in number recognition and counting—without your child ever suspecting you had an ulterior motive!

• Card Games: Simple games like “Go Fish” can introduce young children to numbers. Even if they don’t know the number names yet, they can hold up a card that represents what they want (“Do you have any of these?”) and the other player can name it (“Oh, you want to know if I have any 5s.”). “Go Fish” also requires kids to compare cards in their hand in order to put sets down on the table. (Tip: For very young children, limit the deck to cards 1 through 5, gradually increasing the number as they get older.)

• Cooking: Making cookies has the potential to expose kids to lots of important math basics. For example, measuring teaches “more” vs. “less” and fractions. Sorting the cookies into equal numbers to “share” teaches equivalence. Baking teaches about time.

• Paper Folding Activities: Start appreciating the mathematical nature of traditional activities like wrapping presents, making paper airplanes, and cutting snowflakes from folded paper. In each case, your child is being challenged to visualize how a flat piece of paper relates to its folded version.

• Sewing: Simple sewing project (using glue instead of needles and thread) require spatial skill. Pieces of cloth must be measured, cut, and put together correctly. In fact, there’s nothing like discovering that a seam is on the outside instead of the inside to remind you how important it is to think through spatial relationships carefully. For a first project, try the following: Take two equal-sized pieces of cloth, help your child glue them together on 3 sides, fill this “envelope” with stuffing, and glue up the final side. Result? Not only a handmade pillow of which she can be proud, aut also an early lesson in area versus volume!

So, pull out those board games, mixing bowls, and pieces of paper and start sneaking in math knowledge in ways that are fun for everyone!

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

There’s More to Emotions Than Meets the Eye

When students in my undergraduate classes would hear me announce that at least two sessions would be devoted to the topic of the “Development of Emotional Understanding,” they usually assumed I would simply be listing the ages at which children come to understand different facial expressions – like smiling means “happy” and crying means “sad,” etc. They quickly learned, however, that there’s a lot more to it than that—a lesson that it’s helpful for parents to understand as well so they don’t expect too much from their young child. Here are just a few of the important facts about emotions that adults take for granted but which children must learn—and with supportive parenting (especially parents who aren’t afraid to talk with them about emotions), tend to learn much more quickly. I've taken these from the chapter on Emotional Understanding in the book I co-authored with Dr. Susan Goodwyn entitled Baby Hearts: A Guide to Giving Your Child an Emotional Head Start

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1.Human emotions are vast in number and subtle in their differences. Consider the following different feeling states: Cranky, Cowardly, Curious, Confident, Coy, Cagey, Confused. And these are just ones that start with “C.”

2.Emotions, even strong ones, tend to fade over time.

3.People often experience two or more emotions at once, sometimes even conflicting ones (for example, a “bittersweet” experience).

4.A person can pretend to feel one way when he is really feeling another.

5.One may not actually be aware of one’s own feelings.

6.Certain emotions are not appropriate in certain situations (for example, being gleeful at a funeral or sad at a wedding).

7.Emotions can be powerfully influenced by being in a crowd.

8.Talking about emotions requires knowing your culture’s peculiar metaphors for feelings, such as the following English terms for “happy:” Tickled pink, pleased as punch, thrilled to death, happy as a clam, contented as a cat, on cloud nine.

With all this to learn, it’s enough to make a child “as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof.” Let’s just take one of the above, #3, as an example. A study published in the May 2007 issue of the journal Psychological Science has demonstrated that it’s probably not until children are 10 or 11 years old that they even experience mixed emotions, and, not surprisingly, it’s not until they are capable of experiencing such emotional states themselves that they begin understanding that this possibility exists for other people as well.

It’s no wonder, then, that “emotional understanding” develops gradually even into the teenage years. Actually, I’m betting that we all know adults who still have some growing up to do in this very important domain! .

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

With Signing, Babies Pick the Topic!

As most readers of this blog know, my collaborator and best friend, Dr. Susan Goodwyn, and I conducted federally-funded research demonstrating that baby sign language (particularly our Baby Signs® Program), helps infants learn to talk. There are many reasons for this positive effect, one of which is something developmental psychologists call “infant initiated joint attention.”

What is “joint attention?” Quite simply, it’s when a parent and child are paying attention to the same thing—and “infant initiated joint attention” means that it’s the infant who calls the parent’s attention to something rather than the reverse. And that’s exactly what signing enables preverbal babies to do. When they see a butterfly, they can “tell” their parent about it by doing the BUTTERFLY sign, which inevitably leads to the parent talking about the butterfly—its colors, its flight, other butterflies, etc. Given that we all learn more when we are interested in something, it’s not surprising that being able to launch conversations with signs helps babies pick up words more quickly.

Turns out, though, that the success in initiating joint attention that signing allows has a broader effect, too. Research by one of my graduate students, Dr. Brie Moore, demonstrated that signing results in babies tending in general to initiate joint attention more--even when signs are not involved! In other words, signing teaches babies that their parents will respond positively when they, through whatever means, direct their parents’ attention to something. The other side of this equation, of course, is that a baby’s signing indicates to his/her parents that babies do have minds of their own and enjoy sharing things with them. It makes parents more alert and receptive in general to their baby’s attempts to draw their attention.

In other words, signing has some very obvious benefits—like reducing frustration and tantrums—but it also has more subtle benefits, like inspiring very young children to pick the topics of conversations both with and without the use of signs.

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