Sign With Your Baby: How to Communicate With Infants Before They Can Speak (Paperback)

~ Joseph Garcia (Author) "From the moment babies are born, these tiny human beings start communicating with the world around them..." (more)
Key Phrases: flat base hand, vocabulary section, action hand (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This book teaches hearing parents how to use simple sign language gestures to communicate with their hearing infants before their infants can speak. Joseph Garcia uses anecdotes, practical guidelines and humor to explain the benefits and method for taking advantage of this unique form of early communication. He will help you recognize when your child is receptive to learning. He recommends which signs to teach first and shares ideas for games that can be fun and useful when introducing new signs. The book is also a useful reference with 145 clearly illustrated signs, enabling you to choose and teach the signs that will be most beneficial to you and your child. This book is also included in a separate "package" edition called the SIGN with your BABY Complete Learning Kit - which is comprised of the book, 60 minute training video and quick reference guide.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword--Certain very important facts about human language have been known for many years. Two-thirds to three-quarters of all everyday language is ordinarily acquired by the third birthday. Also, in cases of poor educational performance, inadequate language ability is almost invariably present. What has not been known, surprisingly, is what exactly goes on during those first three years that underlies the acquisition of language. The reason for this strange state of affairs is that the research community has largely neglected the details of development during these early years. Recently, however, important progress has been made.

Even some thirty years ago reports appeared that indicated that children taught sign language had acquired about seventy-five signs by the time they were nine months old. In contrast, the typical child of that age could understand fewer than ten words, regardless of how bright she was.

This was a tantalizing though isolated finding. Until fairly recently, no one in developmental research followed up on this potentially important finding. Now two programs have. One of them is the subject of this book.

I recommend the teaching of signs, starting at about seven months of age, for several reasons. First, sign language represents a second language, and our research consistently showed that when a second language was introduced in an effective manner to a child from the early months on, the child would not only become bilingual by the second birthday, but would be ahead of the monolingual child in both languages! Indeed, that has been the experience of parents in our program.

Second, we have repeatedly found that children, especially boys, though developing well, have few or no spoken words at all until their second birthdays. We have also learned that the period between seventeen and twenty months of age is a particularly difficult time, in that the normal child is very limited in regard to frustration tolerance, and being unable to express himself exacerbates the problem. A child who can sign at that stage of life is a child who will cause considerably less frustration for himself and his parents. That means the attachment process can move along much more smoothly and probably to a better outcome.

Finally, the potential for understanding mental activity in children between eight and twenty-two months of age that is made possible by sign language is intriguing. Someday soon we will take advantage of this remarkable tool to get a much more refined picture of how the mind of a child evolves.

For all these reasons, and because his work is sound, I strongly recommend this groundbreaking work of Joseph Garcia.

Burton L. White, Ph.D., June 1998 Director, The Center for Parent Education Author, "The First Three Years of Life" and "Raising a Happy Unspoiled Child"

Communication, the backbone to a healthy relationship with your child

From the moment babies are born, these tiny human beings start communicating with the world around them. The vital connection between you and your infants depends on this communication. Infants will use extensive body language, facial expressions, and all sorts of verbal sounds to interact with you. These movements and sounds will eventually evolve into language. But until they do, you may have an incredibly difficult time understanding your infants' attempts to tell you things.

How many times have you wished you could look into your babies' minds and know what was going on in there? How many parents have felt the instinctual longing to extract a thought or a word from their troubled infants? The inability to understand your infants is certainly not because you don't try hard enough, nor is it because the infants abandon their attempts to express themselves. Infants have an instinctual need to communicate with you, just as you have an instinctual need to understand them. Infants are born with abundant intelligence. However, they have a limited means to let you know what their thoughts and needs are. Their undeveloped vocal cords restrict them from participating in the verbal language around them. Imagine how it must feel to be a baby who has many specific needs and thoughts to express, but has no effective way to make those specific needs or thoughts understood. At times, it must be frustrating for these small and socially dependent beings to live with these limitations.

Communication is one of the highest forms of social interaction. Leading researchers in infant behavior have determined that social interaction is crucial to all infants' development. They have further concluded that for a caregiver to withhold social responses to an infant's attempts to communicate is one of the most disruptive things that can occur in the infant's learning process.

What can you do to encourage this learning process? Here is where Sign with your Baby can contribute to your infants' development. Imagine how your babies might feel if one day you started using simple hand movements to communicate. Let's say you make a particular motion during a certain daily activity, such as eating. Soon your infants associate that movement with the situation or activity that was taking place when the motion was introduced. They begin to experiment with their own hands and discover they can replicate the movements you make. Receiving reinforcement from you, babies quickly learn that by making this motion, they can communicate their needs and wants. The time between birth and when your infants utter their first recognizable words can be a time of miscommunication or a time when your communication is less than precise. This does not have to be the case. These precious months can be rich in meaningful and effective infant/parent interaction. Using manual communication with your infants can help build a solid foundation for mutual understanding, dramatically contributing to the bonding process. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Northlight Communications; Revised edition (March 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0966836774
• ISBN-13: 978-0966836776
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #109,667 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

143 of 147 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great idea and better than Baby Signs, October 12, 2000

By	Reader14 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sign With Your Baby : How to Communicate With Infants Before They Can Speak (book only) (Paperback)

I have to disagree with Proudparent's review. I first bought the book Baby Signs and found it to be the equivalent of a long article about why teaching your baby to communicate non-verbally is a good thing with some examples of signs that parents had made up on their own. I was already convinced that signing was a good thing and so while I found the book interesting I didn't find it useful. When I ran across Garcia's Sign With Your Baby, is was much more of a "How-To" that helped me get started.

I really like that he advocates use of American Sign Language, it took some of the pressure off us trying to think up appropriate signs. Plus it's a bonafide, beautiful language. We were even able to take out children's books at the library that had the ASL signs along with the English text. Our baby didn't have a problem with the basic signs, we did adapt some ASL signs to make it easier and on occasion made up our own signs. Like Baby Signs, the Garcia book is a bit light, I would have preferred something more comprehensive, but of the two books about signing with your baby, I found it to be the more useful. Our playgroup all taught our babies how to sign in ASL and it's made babysitting each other's children so much easier.

Whichever book you use (or neither, you don't really need a book), do try signing with your baby. It's so much fun for parents, grandparents and babies. Our daughter is talking now, but still uses her signs sometimes. It opened up her world to us so much earlier than we would have thought possible.

127 of 133 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must for reducing the frustration of the toddler years, December 11, 1999

By	A less frustrated mom (Huntington Beach) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sign With Your Baby : How to Communicate With Infants Before They Can Speak (book only) (Paperback)

This book is a wonderful tool for parents wishing to teach their baby to sign. Much of the frustration of the toddler years results from a child's inability to communicate with others. I only wish that I had started earlier with my children. I began teaching my twins to sign at 16 months. Within 3 weeks, my son was signing "more" spontaneously. My daughter was resistant to signing at first and then finally would sign when she thought no one was looking. Now she does it openly and with a big smile since she realizes the power of communication! At 18 months now, they both sign "more", "milk", "please" and "mama". We have also made up a few signs like "blankie" that they are learning to use. It has really reduced some of the frustration in my home, and I plan to continue to use sign with them for as long as it remains useful. I do have a background in sign (I am an audiologist), but this book is simple enough for anyone without any knowledge of sign language to use. A must for every parent of an infant or toddler.

51 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sign With Your Baby, August 9, 2001

By	Thomas M Wiley "[e-mail]" (E. Aurora, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sign With Your Baby : How to Communicate With Infants Before They Can Speak (book only) (Paperback)

Amazing results. My wife and I started to sign to our daughter at 3 months, Milk, Dog, Mom, Dad, Bright Light, and sleep. At 6 months old she was asking to be nursed without crying, at 8 months old she was communicting with us for food, drink, play, naps, diaper change, dog etc.. At one year she was using over 50 signs. Now that she is two, she speaks like a 6 year old, complete sentences, coherent conversations about a single topic, and is beginning to work out written words.

Stick with the signing in the book for 3-4 months and watch your child's vocabulary explode before she's one.

We also believe we avoided a very frustrating time for both us and our daughter by being able to communicate with her so early and telling us her needs and wants.

Invest the $15, and stick with the program, it will amaze you and your family.