Something that a many parents don’t understand when trying to introduce baby sign is the importance of ensuring that you have a balance of motivational and practical signs for your baby.
Practical words are the ones that will help you as a parent to understand what it is that your baby wants such as eat, drink, change, pain, sleep etc and reduce those toddler tantrums.
While these are great for you as a parent as understanding when your child needs to be changed or if they want to go to the toilet when you are trying to toilet train them or any other task that makes your life easier as a parent these words may not be so interesting for your baby.
Your baby obviously finds eating and drinking important but these might not be great motivators for them. So if you are trying to introduce baby sign to your child and not seeing a great response consider the following;
Are the words that you are introducing ones that you are interested in or is your baby interested in these things to?
If your baby isn’t really interested in food/mealtimes then trying to get them to sign the word eat is going to be a tough word to start with.
The important thing with baby sign is for your baby to initially make the connection between signing and results.
So if they like their Teddy and they do the sign sign Teddy make sure that you give them their Teddy and then they can connect the fact that their movement/signing resulted in them getting something they wanted.
This is the breakthrough you need if you find that your signing efforts are not paying off as well as you had hoped.
Once your baby connects their signing action with results it is far easier to introduce other practical words.
So make sure that you mix up practical signs that you want your baby to do with motivational signs that they are interested to start with.
Make a short list of the things your baby is interested in such as their teddy, blanket, ball or a book and make sure that you mix those words in with your practical sign words while following the 10 steps to signing success and you will see great results in your communication.
Happy Signing
