Occasionally some parents run into issues with regards to having baby pick up signing. On very rare occasion, this is due to an actual physical problem with the child. This is, however, only the case in a small fraction of children.
The most common culprit to baby not signing back is starting too early. Babies have been known to sign back as early as 6 months. Chances are very good though, that your baby won’t sign back that early! A six month old who signs is rare indeed. You should expect your baby to sign back at around 10 months of age. This is given you start at around 9 months and don’t put on too much pressure or overwhelm your baby with too many signs, that are taught inconsistently. I talk at lengths in the online course about how signs should be delivered.
In most cases, it is the teacher (read parent) who is messing up the signing process. There are many pitfalls to signing that should be avoided. Signing can be just about signing in front of your baby, but absent of certain rules and formula, can become a frustrating undertaking. This is the main reason we developed our online course to baby sign. We wanted to give parents a shortcut to signing that would take all the guesswork and trial and error out of the picture. Our course guarantees that you will sign back in less than 8 weeks. This is a stretch though, since most babies end up signing back after just 4 weeks.