We taught both our kids to sign.

My favourite moment was in March, my daughter was about to turn 2 and wasn't speaking yet.

I asked her if she would like to hear some music.

She made the sign for dog.

I searched youtube for some songs about dogs and she shook her head.

She made the sign for tree.

I was like "dog, tree", she nodded. Hmmm...

I was searching for "dog tree music" when one of the pictures that came up was a christmas tree.

She pointed to that excitedly!

I was like "dog christmas tree music" ... it took me a second to realise that she wanted to listen to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack that I had had playing off YouTube at Christmas 3 months previously!

I put that on again and we danced around to it.

I thought that was totally wild! It was the first time I remember her communicating a really sophisticated preference other than just wanting to eat/drink/help etc.

What's most surprising to me there is that she actually recognized Snoopy as a dog. He's a pretty abstracted drawing, walking on two feet and pointing with human hands. There's something interesting to be said about perceptual development there. I believe that Daniel Everett said that even the adult Piraha couldn't understand abstracted 2D drawings at all.

The reverse surprised me too: From seeing only abstract drawings of dogs, my daughter pointed at a real dog for the first time and said “dog!”

ML is pretty long way from being able to make generalizations like that from…20 samples?

If we were indoctrinated into the tradition of keeping capybaras as pets then she probably would have assumed snoopy was a capy. As it stands - he’s not a cat, he’s not a bird, so he must be a dog.

I'm pretty sure my two-year-old still thought we could have giraffes and aligators as pets at that age XD

This must have been what it was like when the settlers were trying to communicate with native Americans at first

The crazy thing about this happening with toddlers (at least in my experience) is that you're not really sure how complex their desires are until they manage to communicate them.

Settlers interacting with natives knew full well how complex their desires were – they lived side-by-side, traded, socialised, and learned from each other.[1] Any suggestion of a primitive native is self-comforting propaganda from the industrial complex that comes after the settlers.

[1]: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy; Usner; Omohundro Institute; 2014.

The settlers were greeted by English speaking native Americans who had been working the shipping trade.

Unfortunately, the settlers never really got what the native Americans were trying to say.

Which group is the toddler here?

One group had an advanced democratic government of the people which the other group struggled to learn from: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/democracy-indigenous-ame...

What an absolutely ridiculous statement. Go to reddit with that.

When signing dog, was she referring to reindeers?

Charlie Brown -> Snoopy, would be my guess.

The album cover for the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack has Snoopy sitting on top of a Christmas tree. I was playing the album from YouTube through the stereo and the album cover was showing on the TV to which the computer was connected.

I had heard about this before my son was born. We didn't try to teach him anything, anytime we remembered (which was sporadic) we just used the gestures when talking to him. I was amazed at how quickly he picked up on it, and he was able to communicate his needs to us months before he was able to verbalize.

It took very minimal effort on our part, and was very rewarding for him; certainly a lot better than him crying with the hope that we could guess what he wanted. Definitely recommended for any new parents.

The best moment was when he was sitting on the floor, and looked up at his mom and made the "together" sign, it was heart melting.

I love seeing how language develops in my kids and how they start to invent ways to communicate. Our first, she would say "hold you" when she wanted to be picked up, which she learned from us saying "do you want me to hold you?" My 2 year old now says "huggy" when he wants to be picked up.

In other words, you can invent your own sign language because your child won't need to use it with other people.

Why not use a common sign language and give then a head start if they ever do want to use it outside the family?

They might not have the dexterity required for some of the more complex signs, I would guess. If you devise your own gestures they can be much simpler.

No, the basics like hungry and please/thank you are fairly simple. The daycare my son goes to teaches all the kids sign language starting at like 6 months.

The signs chosen to teach to babies tend to be pretty simple. Things like "more" or "milk" are very easy.

plus you can use it as a battle language for your clan

Exactly! Using a pre-made sign language is missing the point entirely...

I'm not crying, you're crying!

FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/

I have friends who had much more success with it, but the value will largely depend on your child’s relative developmental strengths. A friend’s son with autism got literally years’ benefit out of the gestures before verbal speech caught up.

My kids both picked it up, but my younger was similar. Being able to sign "please" and "all done" helps anyway because "eeess" and "a ya" are what she actually says.

Same with my nephew. He also has autism and the first thing the speech therapist did when he was 3 was teach him simple sign language. It became such a great catalyst for communication. He's nowhere near his his age (now 6) developmentally but within ~6 weeks he went from completely non-verbal to actually vocalizing the simple words he learned the sign language for.

> FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/

Could still useful: instead of shouting across the playground on whether they have to go potty you can simply make the gesture with minimal embarrassment. :)

I also usually had success with signs when the child was otherwise too emotional to verbalize their desire. They're really upset and crying hard so it is hard to talk especially when talking clearly is already a challenge, but signing "milk" or "eat" or "hurt" or "more" can come through easily.

Wow I had not considered this at all. We used a bit of sign language before my toddler started talking, but have more recently run into these situations where big feelings are crowding out speech and it’d be useful to get anything through. I’ll give this a shot tomorrow

Yeah, a handful of signs is useful for adults in many situations where voice comms don't work. And, at least in my circles, there's a small shared vocabulary of signs that there's a good chance will work. Potty, ouch, sleep, eat, maybe a couple more.

Tread carefully: the sign for poop looks close enough to a crude gesture (cruder than just shouting "poop" at a playground, as it turns out) that an ignorant bystander might take it significantly wrongly.

There's probably variation among babies. One of my nephews would examine his feet if you asked them where are his shoes, even before walking. He got so proficient with signs that it delayed talking; he preferred signaling and grunting :/

> He got so proficient with signs that it delayed talking; he preferred signaling and grunting :/

Please don't blame this on the signs! This doesn't mean that he would have learned to speak earlier if not for the signs. I'd be glad that he could communicate proficiently at all.

The gestures also help disambiguate some words. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between "Mama", "More" and "Milk" the way my toddler pronounces them, but her gestures make it clear...

>They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking

were you always talking when you signed to them? maybe they thought it went together.

I had the opposite experience. My daughter had multiple signs down by 7 months.

One of the funniest interactions I had with my eldest daughter was the day we baked cookies together, when she not yet 2. She was verbalizing a lot, but also signing "milk" and "more" quite a bit. And when she bit into her very first chocolate chip cookie of her entire life, she immediately signed "more" and said as much through the mouthful of cookie.

You remind me of the following.

At about the same age, I bought my son a mango lassi. He looked suspiciously at it, but took a sip. With a look of shocked delight he tilted it back, back, back, and emptied the cup!

Then he put it down, looked at me, and said, "Want more!"

I'm looking forward to kids out of the house. But there are some moments that I treasure.

Once mine learned the sign for “cookie” it became the only word in her vocabulary for a month

> regular ASL gestures for the work in question. If you're not native English-speaking you'd look up the gestures in your specific region/language's sign language:

It probably doesn't matter either way for babies, but fyi ASL isn't a sign version of English; it is its own language. In fact American Sign Language is more closely related to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language. The Australian and New Zealand Sign Languages are largely derived from British Sign Language, so there isn't really a correlation between English speaking regions and ASL. Canadians mostly use American Sign Language and French Canadian Sign Language.

This is good advice but with a caveat: some of the muscle control required for particular signs is not able to be learned by children until they're a bit older.

For example, voluntary supination/pronation of the forearm is generally not something a 9month old can do. If you try and teach them a common sign for "enough/finished" (fist closed, thumb pointed out, then rotation of the forearm back and forth), or "done" and "more" in the parent link, they probably won't be able to do it properly. They can copy something close to that (thumb out and wobbling their hand around? good enough!) so you have to go with the flow.

There are quite a few signs like that actually, so try and think about how many muscles move together, and how controlled or complex that is. Simple stuff is good -- and doable.

Yeah my daughter used to stick out her index finger and wave it back and forth for finished.

One of my favourite memories of that was when we went to see the Vivid light show in Sydney and there was a contortionist on the street so we stopped to watch. I looked into the stroller and said "What do you think?" and she made the sign for "finished". So we moved on.

> Yeah my daughter used to stick out her index finge

This is interesting. My son also did "index finger up" in response to "thumbs up" for the longest time. Why is the thumb so hard to manipulate? Late addition to the evolutionary sequence?

We did this with our boys. The oldest picked up a sign we weren't even trying to teach: whenever I changed his poopy diaper I'd say "phoo phoo phoo!" jokingly and fan my noise. One day he was playing on the other side of the room and fanned his nose. He'd pooped and was telling us. Super cool.

My toddler learnt "more" and now uses it to get me to repeatedly sing the same song OVER AND OVER again. They haven't used the word yet, though they do speak other words.

I wish I'd learnt sign language before having kids so I just already knew how to do it, it's so cool. Props to the Ms. Rachel videos for including so many signs.

My mom taught us some words somewhere around 5-8 years old, so we could signal things to each other instead of interrupting conversations. The three in particular I remember are "hungry", "bored", and "thank you" (so she could remind us to say it without the other person realizing).

Every kid is different. YMMV. We did some ASL gestures/words with our daughter and it worked very well. I'd encourage everyone to at least give it a try. She took to it and was "talking" to us (mainly "hungry" and "milk", but we got "enough" sometimes too) pretty quickly.

I can't remember exact ages and timeframes-- that time of my life is "blurry". I wish I could remember all the gestures we used. (The only ones I can remember now are "milk", "apple", and "thank you".) As she became verbal she quickly transitioned away from them.

I made an attempt with this, but my toddler never picked up anything because:

-She learned some gestures of mine instead, which I didn't realize I was doing.

-Defaulted to speech as soon as possible because it was just easier.

Interestingly there isn't any correspondence between spoken language and sign language in the linguistic sense. Correspondence between the dominant sign language and the dominant spoken language is mostly due to geographical colocation. So while you are right to say "your specific region's sign language", there are several distinct sign languages in places that all have English as their primary spoken language.

I vaguely recall a documentary about the very real conflict in the deaf community regarding restoring hearing (especially to the very young) via cochlear implants, etc. Leaving aside that particular element, one of the other controversies was about a specific form of sign that is essentially a signed phonetic alphabet. So while it's (obviously) not compatible with regular sign languages - which have visual representation of grammar and meaning - it does have the benefit that those who learn it are primarily fluent in their native language, which many deaf people are not especially good at, since it's always been a language that they only learn from books. And you can learn a new oral language the same way that the rest of us do - instead of sounding it out with your mouth, you sign it out with your hands.

But I can never seem to find more information about it, and can't recall the documentary name for the life of me. Since you seem to have at least some familiarity with this, do you happen to know what I'm talking about?

I taught one of my younger brothers a simple sign language when I was younger. His speech was delayed by like 8 months compared to the rest of us. Can't say for sure, but there's a need to emphasize spoken communication with the sign language.

We learned ours following: * more * all done * milk (as in breast feeding) * drink

I think it makes a big difference, both for us (parents, to have a clue what they want) and the kid (being understood, when they can’t speak).

Worked incredibly well for our first born, but 2nd child just wanted to talk like their sibling.

Almost 20 years later, I still know all the signs for baby food ;)