If you google baby sign language you’re sure to get a lot of results. But what you may not realise are all of those results derive from the years of research by Dr. Linda Acredolo & Susan Goodwyn. In fact, today’s parents almost don’t give it a second thought when they incorporate baby sign language into their families lives, but in 1982 the idea of using signs with hearing babies and babies understanding them? Well that really was a very far-fetched concept.

So how did baby sign language start? It started one day organically when Linda’s twelve month old daughter Kate used the gesture of “sniffing her fingers” when she heard the word “flower” or saw a presentation of it. On that day baby sign language was discovered, and it was discovered in a natural environment within the scared relationship between Mum and daughter, with not a clipboard in sight!

However, in order for anyone to take this natural interaction seriously, research needed to be done. Luckily for parents Linda was a child development researcher, who took her daughter’s gesture to mean more than just a random movement. Dr. Linda Acedolo teamed with Dr. Susan Goodwyn to research this natural interaction and what they found was babies desperately wanted to communicate and that they understood more than what they could say. They all used intuitive, natural and simple signs to express themselves – the Baby Signs program was born.

So next time your baby does something and you just put it down to coincidence, or perhaps just a quirky thing, think about the Baby Signs story – maybe it will be the start of something great.

Dr. Linda Acredolo & Susan Goodwyn wrote the ground-breaking book, Baby Signs: How to Talk to Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk, published in 1996 which quickly became a bestseller (over 400,000 copies sold in the U.S. alone and translated into 14 foreign languages).

Below is a video of Sam out with his parents using the Baby Signs program to communicate.

Most people would all agree that gratitude is part of our lives, whether through a pray, a lot of thank yous when someone does something special, or when you stop just in time before an accident occurs. But is having gratitude for the things and service done to us that important? Well in a study conducted by Dr. Froh it is.

“In a study published in 2008, Dr. Froh found that middle school students who counted their blessings and acknowledged the things they were grateful for reported higher levels of well-being than those who did not. Specifically, students who counted their blessings reported more gratitude, optimism, life satisfaction, and less negative emotions. The most significant finding was the robust relationship between gratitude and satisfaction with school experience at both the immediate post-test and 3-week follow-up”

Dr. Linda Acredolo & Susan Goodwyn of course knew this when they designed the Baby Signs program and knew that teaching it at a very young age was important.  They built gratitude into their Baby Signs program because babies have the capacity, of course at a very rudimentary level, the understanding of gratitude.

In our own family we incorporated gratitude into our daughter’s baby signs learning, and now have a very polite, delightful child who shows gratitude in the smallest of things. The other day my daughter was too tired to clean her room by herself so I helped her. At the end she threw her arms around my neck and said, “Thank you Mummy, I was too tired to clean my room by myself, I’m so glad you helped me”.

If you wish to know more about the Baby Signs program visit www.babysignsaustralia.com.au or www.babysigns.com .

For those who want to explore the joys of gratitude, take a look at this video, it’s inspiring!

Over the years we shared some fabulous stuff with families and their babies about baby communication, baby sign language and we have now set up a blog site that puts all of that information in one place!  If you have any baby signing stories, articles etc, let us know and we will post it here.

If you would like to know about our classes or products head over to www.babysignsaustralia.com.au and you’ll find everything you need to find.