Teach your baby how to sign not whine

There is a particular span of time which is frustrating for both parent and child, maybe more to the child.

It is the time between when children begin communicating non-verbally and when they speak in words.

The child screams, cries, has a tantrum, just to try to communicate to the parent/caregiver.

After the uproar and confusion of what could be bothering her, you realize she just needed a drink of milk or maybe that her gums hurt from teething.

While there still might be screaming, crying and tantrums, there is an alternative to holding your breath during this frustrating time: baby sign language.

“Signing with hearing babies allows them to express emotions, feelings, needs and to increase engagement by lowering the stress in the family,” said Edmonds resident Nancy Hanauer, who teachers sign language to hearing families with hearing babies in the north King and South Snohomish County areas. She runs a class at the Frances Anderson Center in Edmonds and also teaches the same course in local homes, child care centers and schools.

Hanauer, a state certified teacher, has spent much of her professional life instructing the deaf and hard of hearing and hearing children who struggle with reading. She started teaching the “Signing With Your Baby” course about two years ago.

The American Sign Language course she teaches is the program “Sign With Your Baby” created by Bellingham resident Joseph Garcia.

Garcia said the point of teaching hearing parents and babies sign language is simply to try to make parents better parents.

“Signing is a gift from the deaf to the hearing,” Garcia said. “I believe (being deaf) is not a symbol of a disability but one of an ability.”

There are other forms of baby sign language and books that teach it, Hanauer said, “but if it’s not American Sign Language, it’s fake, and is teaching the child a secret language,” she said. American Sign Language can be translated in an emergency situation by anyone who knows how to sign, Hanauer said.

It also “teaches them a sensitivity at a young age to people who use another language to communicate,” Hanauer said.

Garcia, who has been featured on the television news program 20/20, said he started the program after years of experience interpreting for the deaf and teaching sign language. He said as he taught special education, early childhood development and adult education he realized by teaching hearing adults how to sign to hearing babies, that would help resolve some of their daily stress.

Garcia knows the ups and downs of parenting. He and his wife have two teenage children and an adopted 10-month-old.

Garcia said he started early in teaching his new baby signs.

“Don’t wait until they are expressing signs to start teaching,” Garcia said.

Just because your baby isn’t signing back doesn’t mean they don’t understand far more than they produce, he said.

“They have gone through this incredible mental process before that associating the infrastructure for later spoken language,” Garcia said.

Skeptics have said if children are signing, it will delay them from actually talking. But Hanauer said, in her experience, children speak sooner because of the signing. She teaches with the signing to also speak the word.

“There’s more brain activity with signing, they have to think about it, say the word and sign it,” she said.

A challenge of signing is that it won’t work when the baby isn’t looking. Or, since the parent can speak and hear, it is hard to remember to practice the signing with the baby throughout the day, said some parents in the class in Edmonds given by Hanauer. The class is filled with parents and babies from five months to the oldest, Lynnwood resident Addison Turner, 13 months.

Addison’s grandparents, Dee and Fred Busch of Everett, care for Addison about three days a week and have been signing to him for months.

“We spend the most intense time with it,” Dee said.

Dee said she learned about it from a television show and made some effort and found out it works.

“He understands all of the signs we do to him and he knows a few himself and has made up his own signs,” she said. “He just signed his first sentence the other day.”

He was walking on a bridge over a creek and while he usually would stick his hand in the water ,he stopped and signed “water, no, cold,” she said.

In the class, some parents/caregivers choose to include their child in the class while others choose to learn on their own and then teach the child at home. Either way is fine, Hanauer said.

Hanauer encourages her students to stick with the basics when signing with babies. “You need to have the basics to get through the rough times,” she said.

Her classes consist of babies from five months to 2 and a half-years-old. But due to popular demand, she is planning on having a follow up, refresher workshop for past students who are now 5-to-7 years old and who wanted to continue learning signing for fun.

While you can start signing with your baby at five months or earlier, babies won’t typically start to sign back until they are about eight months to 1- year-old, she said.

“About the time they are waving “hi” and “bye” on their own,” Hanauer said, it is something parents/caregivers need to stick to, because the child will eventually start signing.

Mill Creek residents Joe and Lisa Boscacci, parents of fraternal twins Gianna and Jared, learned the basics of baby signing from one of Garcia’s books, when the twins were about 8-months-old, Lisa Boscacci said.

“It was hard to stick with it, because you don’t see results right away,” she admits. “Then, literally, all of a sudden about when they turned 1-year-old they started signing back.

“I just picked five or six signs to get us through the rough times – ones to help communicate with us before they could talk,” Boscacci said.

The signs the Boscacci’s picked were “eat,” “more,” “all done,” “down,” “ouch” and “please” and “thank you.”

“And they have made up signs of their own, and then the twins copied each other to use the signs” she said, which the experts say is very common.

Now the twins are 22 months, and their words have for the most part taken over, Boscacci said. But every once in awhile Gianna will sign what she wants after her words aren’t answered right away or if she doesn’t get the answer she wants, her Mom said.