The challenge that is baby signing – learning a new skill.  There are many reasons to sign with your baby, but probably one of the least to be listed is that signing is a great personal challenge.  Very few of us speak more than one language, but the beauty of teaching ASL to your baby is that it’s a real living language.  That’s right, teaching and learning ASL will turn you bilingual.  If you travel anywhere in North America, your hand gestures and movements will be recognized by others.

Think of learning ASL like a form of personal development.  Call signing a skill and one you can develop and cultivate from the comfort of your own home.  Not only this, but after its mastery, you can teach it to another living person – your baby.  You could spend your baby’s early years learning to knit scarves and mittens, but these will only be useful in winter and won’t help beyond retaining warmth.  The challenge of learning and teaching ASL are so much more broad and far reaching.  Besides, when you knit, it’s just you and yarn – what a yawn.  As a signing Dad, I can say unequivocally that it has been great fun to learn to sign with my son and one I wouldn’t trade for any other skill.

Signing is easy too, that’s the best part.  It’s easy to learn to sign a word in less than a minute, perfect with a few strokes and apply in a fraction of the time.  Signing is as easy as looking up a desired word and doing it.  You have all the tools right in front of you so long as you have a good working signing dictionary.  Learning ASL is a learn as you go sort of thing which is great.  All you need to do is stay one or two signs ahead of your little guy.  If you can keep up with a baby – you can teach ASL.  Signing is a great way to develop yourself, not to mention all the side benefits you will enjoy as you connect with your baby.

Toddlers are wonderfully creative and when they’ve been taught to sign, they’ll use this avenue to express themselves just as they would any other.  This is why you should come to expect that your signing baby will eventually make a sign up!  If you’re armed and ready for all interests, you might stifle this tendency, but even this might cause your baby to label things to their choosing since their understanding of sign language will be greater.

After a while your baby understands that hand movements and actions have meaning.  Your baby might make something up by twisting their hands in specific and repeated ways while even holding their fingers in a specific handshape!  This is a demonstration of their real understanding of sign language and is a milestone within baby sign language.  What happens next is up to you.  You can let it slip by and celebrate it, or correct it with the correct ASL version.  This will be entirely up to you and will depend on your ultimate aim with baby sign language.  Will you continue with it as a second language or will you eventually drop signs?

The more brazen of children will also insist that certain things are different from what they are.  This is a clear illustration of the type of personality they have.  For example, some babies might insist that an APPLE is actually a BALL or vice versa.  Even after cutting up the apple and serving it to your baby, he still might insist that he ate a ball!  Yes, your baby is a bit stubborn!  This is why signing is so great, it helps us learn about our babies much before we could otherwise.