01.30.07

Talking Babes

Posted in Growth & Development at 8:24 am by Jennifer

I watched my niece at the age of about 18 months using baby signs taught to her by her parents and her vocabulary flourish. This adorable little girl continues to be amazingly verbose for a 2 year old. Then I got pregnant and had my baby evicted from a cozy womb at 31 weeks. A lot of unexpected and unwelcomed paranoia comes with having a preemie baby, including, “Will she be speech delayed?” So, to give my daughter an extra boost my husband I decided that we, too, would teach her how to sign. There are many supporting studies showing that teaching your baby sign language does not hinder speech development. It actually aids it!Doing some research I found a fantastic DVD that had excellent customer reviews on Amazon.com. “My Baby Can Talk” has been one of my daughter’s favorite “movies” since about 10 months old. It wasn’t long after using the DVD that she started using a couple of the signs. She has slowly added more and now at 17 months, she is using at least 25 different signs. (The signs taught are official signs of the American Sign Language.) She is also is making great strides in her efforts to talk. She has about 12 fairly intelligible words in her vocabulary, which is on track according to the speech-language pathologists on Talking Child (www.talkingchild.com). I also have their Baby Babble DVD and Sophia seems love to it. Of course, most importantly, we just talk to her and she tries to mimic which is just too cute on any baby.

What’s really cool about both of these sites is that they offer tools, not just sales. My Baby Can Talk site has a video dictionary of all the signs. And Talking Child has development charts. Both of these have helped my paranoia and I feel more educated in knowing how to help my daughter’s speech develop. Of course, I realize about 12 years from now I’ll regret her ever learning to talk…. hopefully she won’t being using a more explicit form of sign langugage then, either!

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