Baby Sign Language lessens frustration and tantrums by teaching your infant, baby, or toddler sign language pre-speech. This helps babies clearly communicate specific thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs before they are physically able to speak. Twenty years of research show that Baby sign language enhances your baby’s language, cognitive development, emotional, and intellectual development.

The benefits of signing are:

• Signing allows an infant to communicate accurately their thoughts, needs and feelings before they can speak.
• Signing reduces frustration for babies. The second year of life can be one of great frustration for infants and their care takers. One of the major causes of tantrums is the toddler's inability to communicate.
• Signing gives a window into the infant's mind and personality, as they can communicate outside of the here and now.
• Signing enhances parent-child bonding, facilitating a close relationship between parent and child.
• Signing promotes excellent interaction. Why? Because when using signing, parents automatically adopt positive interaction strategies such as following the child's focus of interest, making eye contact, speaking slowly, and using simple key words.
• Signing facilitates an adult's ability to interpret early attempts at words and to assign meaning to them (e.g. a child says 'ba' and signs bath, and says 'ba' and signs ball. Because he is using signs as well, his dad knows exactly what he wants).
• Signing children tend to be more interested in books. Using signing alongside looking at books allows an infant to become an active participant in the story telling and their interest in books soars.

Top Tips to start baby signing

• Begin with simple word signs such as eat, drink and hot when a baby is aged six to nine months
• Follow the baby's lead and from nine months onwards, observe what interests the child and introduce signs that will mirror this
• Always say the word when you sign, never sign in silence
• Speak slowly and clearly but in a natural way
• Keep it simple, using just one sign per sentence
• Be consistent in the signs you use but happily accept any signing attempts from the young child
• Do not get babies to 'perform' signs on demand
• Be patient and relaxed about baby signing, using lots of praise