Teaching Your Baby to Use Signs and Gestures
This video lesson is part of our Small Talk course, created by licensed speech-language pathologists and hosted by Expressable's Chief Clinical Officer Leanne Sherred, M.S., CCC-SLP. Small Talk teaches you simple strategies to help your newborn to 18-month-old learn to communicate. Featuring expert, research-backed tips and techniques, plus demonstrations from a real mom and her toddler.
Video transcript:
Thank you so much for joining me today. I’m so excited to discuss one of the most important techniques you can use to grow your baby’s language abilities - gesturing, signing, and body language.
In our previous lessons, we covered so much important information - from why your involvement and participation in your child’s language growth is so vital, to typical communication milestones at each developmental stage throughout your child’s first 18 months, to foundational parenting support strategies, like modeling and wait times, and more.
And all of this has set the stage for the next part of our course - fun and practical ways that you can use to promote your child’s language growth and development at home.
All the tips and strategies we’ll be working on are effective, backed by research, and used by myself and other speech-language pathologists. Best of all, they don’t require a big shift in how you’re already interacting with your child - just small, purposeful changes that, when added together, make a big difference.
So let’s start moving up that language ladder! We’ve also provided handy overviews of each of the techniques we’ll be discussing, which can be reviewed and downloaded from the resources section.
For our first lesson, we’re going to be talking about gesturing, signing, and body language.
How many times have you looked at your baby and wondered what they were thinking? How often do you wish your baby could meaningfully communicate their needs - whether they’re hungry, thirsty, tired, or want a toy - without the cries and temper tantrums?
Many parents and caregivers often find themselves living with this mystery until their baby is able to use real words.
But here's the good news: It’s possible to help your child communicate much sooner, even before they've said their first word!
In fact, when you hear the words “speech and language,” you’d be completely forgiven if you were under the impression that I was only referring to how a child expresses themselves verbally. But there is an entire world of nonveral communication development that happens long before those first words, from the moment your child is born.
From the smile your child gives you, to pointing towards something they want, the scrunched up face they make when trying a new food, or using hand signs like “eat,” “drink,” or “go” - all of this is nonverbal communication!
You can generally infer what your child is trying to communicate - and how they’re feeling - based on these nonverbal cues. It gives parents a peek inside their baby’s thoughts, increases the bond you have with your child, and can make you more responsive to their needs. Signs and gestures also encourage independence and nonverbal communication, which can lead to happier, less frustrated babies.
That’s a win-win for everybody!
We define a sign or gesture as any action, or movement of a part of the body, especially the hands or head, used with the intention to communicate an idea or meaning. Many gestures we do with our hands, like pointing or waving, as well as our facial expressions, like smacking lips when we’re hungry.
This might sound simple, but research has shown that a baby’s ability to use gestures is one of the stronger predictors of language success, and children that produce more gestures early on will develop larger expressive vocabularies as they age. One landmark study in 2005 showed that children who first produced a gesture and word combination were more quickly able to combine words together to create short, two-word phrases - a quintessential milestone for 2 years olds!
Typically, around 7-9 months, babies will begin using simple gestures and signs to request exactly what they want.
Before we dive into specific techniques, let’s get one thing out of the way: teaching your baby signs and gestures do not cause a delay in speech and language development. This is a misconception I commonly hear from parents. They raise the concern, understandably, that if a baby can express their needs with simple gestures, won’t they be less motivated to learn words?
That’s not the case, and it’s not rooted in fact or research. . If anything, teaching a baby sign language in conjunction with words helps promote language growth.
Signs and gestures aren’t intended to replace verbal language and it doesn’t necessarily increase their use of language. A child is always learning and developing language. Baby signs simply allow children to easily express themselves when the word might not yet be available.
As children begin to learn and imitate sounds and words, and their verbal vocabulary grows, these gestures typically fade away. What’s important is that you model both gestures and words when introducing baby signs.
Not that that’s out of the way, let’s discuss how you teach and promote gestures with your toddler.
Let’s ground this technique in my favorite activity, and I’m sure one of your childs as well: eating! Let’s say it’s almost lunch time and you know your baby is hungry, so they begin doing what babies do best, crying.
Think about how the situation would normally progress. Do they start crying until you give them food? Well, let’s try to replace that behavior with a simple gesture.
As your child is crying, show them the food. Then, pause and wait for a moment. In these instances, we want to give them an opportunity - with plenty of encouragement, of course - to communicate. Otherwise, they’ll begin to associate crying with getting what they want, which is no fun for anyone.
So, we give them the chance to be communicative BEFORE we give them what they want so they explore and learn new ways to request.
Show them the food and wait a few seconds. If they don’t gesture, then model a sign like, “more,” “eat,” or “hungry.” Prompt your child to imitate you, and then provide them with the reward! In this case, their food!
You can also reinforce these gestures by placing your hand over their hand, and guiding them through the motions. So you could make the sign for “are you hungry?” Or model “all done!” after your child has finished their meal.
There’s a lot of potential gestures out there - so where do you start?
It’s important to start by focusing on functional words that help babies express their basic, everyday needs. For instance, it’s probably not necessary for a child to initially gesture for things they don’t need, such as colors, animals, foods that they aren’t familiar with, or objects they’ve never used.
Some helpful functional words to begin with include:
More
Eat
Drink
Please
Help
Milk
Hungry
Water
All done
Go
Remember, it may take a lot of repetition and practice before your child begins imitating your signs. So practice frequently. And don’t forget to offer tons of positive reinforcement when they do a job well done! As your child learns to gesture more and more, they’ll begin to make the connection between your praise, or smile, or clap, or exaggerated voice, and the action they’re performing. This will encourage them to communicate more, which contributes to further speech and language development!
Another important and powerful gesture is pointing. By the time your child turns one years old, you should notice them beginning to point to desired objects.
Next time your child is crying or upset and unable to communicate what they need, ask them to show you what they want. You may need to point to various items you suspect your baby may want in order to prompt them to point.
Providing choices like this is another great technique where, instead of giving into a child’s demands immediately, we encourage them to independently make requests. When offering choices, we should take note of the context. Are they reaching towards the toy cupboard? Or are they pointing to the pantry?
If so, we can reach into the pantry and take out two choices - maybe it’s cookies and carrots. Present these choices to your child and model “cookies” or “carrots.” See if they’ll point to the option or nod towards the option they prefer.
And finally, here’s another crowd favorite to teach gestures: bubbles! What kiddo doesn’t love them? Blow bubbles with your child, point at the bubbles, and then pop them with your finger. Make sure to model language and words while pointing and popping: “Look at the bubbles; I see some bubbles” or “pop bubbles.”
So, in summary, here’s a few tips we discussed that you can begin implementing with your baby today.
Gesturing is such a simple skill! It can also save you and your little one so much time and frustration by giving them an effective form of communication before they are able to tell you what they need. So start practicing today!
