Sign Language
Babble has a segment from Pamela Paul's book on the hype about sign language. Just last week, I met a mother who said her son has learnt sign language. I was about to ask if he had a hearing impairment. But on reading this it all makes sense. I really think teaching infants sign language where there is no hearing impairment is quite ridiculous. Pamela Paul sums it up here.
The results were also inconsistent. One early study measured an improvement in language at the very beginning of the training, but by the time the babies reached two years of age the advantages linked to signing had disappeared. The researchers were unable to establish any of the other benefits attributed to baby signing, finding no evidence of improved emotional development, cognitive development, or parent-child bonding; indeed, these areas weren't even explored in the studies. Moreover, the research focused on signing taught by Baby Signs-trained parents. Today, a slew of classes unaffiliated with the institute as well as piles of videos and DVDs claim to teach babies signing. No one has studied the effectiveness of these alternatives.
It's not that baby signing is bad for kids; it simply may not be beneficial in the way parents are led to believe. Nor is it clear that the benefits correlated with signing are necessarily caused by signing. Parents who sign to their children are also talking to them — and no study can prove that talking alone didn't lead to later verbal advances. The 2005 report urged caution: "Parents can be stressed by the challenges of meeting demands of work, caring for a young child, and other family and personal obligations, and experience guilt if they feel they are not doing everything recommended by infancy specialists and the infancy industry," the authors wrote. "Secondly, the normal course of child development may be challenged by efforts towards earlier and greater developmental achievements.
The short prelingual period of the child's life is concomitant with other naturally occurring milestones in gross motor and in nonverbal social development."
In other words, training babies to communicate using signs may disrupt important routes and patterns of development for other skills and processes besides language. Humans are not, after all, designed to be on a fast-track singular path to speech.
For now, the evidence doesn't weigh definitively for or against. "Our final recommendation for parents was that they should find activities that they enjoy with their child and spend one-on-one time sharing language with their baby," the report notes. "If for one family, it's sign language that comes naturally to them and stimulates their language interactions then that's fine for that family. For other parents, the activity might be reading."
The most reassuring thing you can say to parents about signing is that it's just not necessary. But in our consumer parenting culture, parents have been told that buying into a package or program is smarter than what one could do on one's own, for free.
The results were also inconsistent. One early study measured an improvement in language at the very beginning of the training, but by the time the babies reached two years of age the advantages linked to signing had disappeared. The researchers were unable to establish any of the other benefits attributed to baby signing, finding no evidence of improved emotional development, cognitive development, or parent-child bonding; indeed, these areas weren't even explored in the studies. Moreover, the research focused on signing taught by Baby Signs-trained parents. Today, a slew of classes unaffiliated with the institute as well as piles of videos and DVDs claim to teach babies signing. No one has studied the effectiveness of these alternatives.
It's not that baby signing is bad for kids; it simply may not be beneficial in the way parents are led to believe. Nor is it clear that the benefits correlated with signing are necessarily caused by signing. Parents who sign to their children are also talking to them — and no study can prove that talking alone didn't lead to later verbal advances. The 2005 report urged caution: "Parents can be stressed by the challenges of meeting demands of work, caring for a young child, and other family and personal obligations, and experience guilt if they feel they are not doing everything recommended by infancy specialists and the infancy industry," the authors wrote. "Secondly, the normal course of child development may be challenged by efforts towards earlier and greater developmental achievements.
The short prelingual period of the child's life is concomitant with other naturally occurring milestones in gross motor and in nonverbal social development."
In other words, training babies to communicate using signs may disrupt important routes and patterns of development for other skills and processes besides language. Humans are not, after all, designed to be on a fast-track singular path to speech.
For now, the evidence doesn't weigh definitively for or against. "Our final recommendation for parents was that they should find activities that they enjoy with their child and spend one-on-one time sharing language with their baby," the report notes. "If for one family, it's sign language that comes naturally to them and stimulates their language interactions then that's fine for that family. For other parents, the activity might be reading."
The most reassuring thing you can say to parents about signing is that it's just not necessary. But in our consumer parenting culture, parents have been told that buying into a package or program is smarter than what one could do on one's own, for free.
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