There’s nothing more heart-wrenching than hearing your baby cry and not knowing what’s wrong. Unfortunately, until they can talk, babies are literally “at a loss for words” when it comes to telling us what’s going on with them and how best we can help. At least that used to be the case. Now, thanks to a new approach to infant communication we call the Baby Signs® Program, children don’t have to wait until they can talk to let us know what’s on their minds.

What Is On Their Minds?

Just because babies can’t talk doesn’t mean they don’t have lots to say. Especially as they approach their first birthdays, babies understand a good deal about the world and even a great many of the words adults use to talk about it. “Go get your diaper, Taylor,” and 12-month-old Taylor happily toddles off and grabs a diaper. “Time for your bath, Mason,” and 13-month-old Mason heads to the bathroom as fast as his wobbly legs can carry him.

But ask Taylor or Mason why they are crying, and although they understand the question and know full well what the answer is, all they can do is cry harder. The problem is with the painstakingly slow development of the ability to produce words. To say even a simple word like “milk” or “juice” requires the intricate sequencing of a complex assortment of tiny muscles. The task is particularly challenging because at birth, Taylor and Mason’s vocal tract more closely resembles that of a chimpanzee than an adult human’s!

The Baby-Created Solution

Fortunately, babies are a good deal more adept at controlling the movement of other parts of their bodies – and they know it! As our research studies in the mid-1980s documented, in their desperation to communicate, many babies spontaneously create gestural symbols or “signs” to stand for the things they want to talk about. They may emphatically blow-blow-blow when their food or bath water is too hot, delightedly pant-pant-pant to let you know they see a dog, or even combine the pant-pant-pant with a knob-turning gesture to tell you the family dog wants to go out! All of these are self-created “signs” we saw babies using in their desperation to find a way around the frustrating barrier of not being able to talk. In fact, the very first baby we saw do this was Linda’s own 12-month-old daughter, Kate, way back in 1982. The sniff-sniff-sniff she adopted to label flowers was what set this whole signing movement in motion!

Making It Easy for Babies

Once you know that babies are eager to use simple gestures to stand for things, the natural next step is to make it easy for them by purposefully modeling signs for things they are likely to want to talk about — like they are hungry, thirsty, or want more; like their bathwater or food is too hot: like they hear a dog barking or an airplane flying overhead. Providing sign suggestions and tips for teaching is what the Baby Signs® Program is all about. Drawing on simple signs from American Sign Language (ASL), as well as a few baby-created suggestions, we’ve designed wonderful resources and fun classes that can make learning signs a breeze for everyone in the family.

But Will They Learn to Talk?

“If you encourage a baby to use signs, won’t that slow down learning to talk? If she can get what she wants with signs, why bother to learn words?” It’s the most common concern we hear parents voice and it’s the specific question we have worked very hard over many years to answer. With the help of a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we carefully compared signing babies to non-signing babies from the same communities on standardized tests of verbal language development. What did we find? In test after test the signers were more advanced than the non-signers in language skills. They were learning to talk sooner, not later! Here’s how we like to explain it: Just as crawling doesn’t slow down walking, signing doesn’t slow down talking. In fact, it adds to a baby’s enthusiasm for doing so. We’ve even discovered that the children who had used signs as infants scored significantly higher than the non-signers on IQ tests at age 8!

More Important Benefits

As glad as we were to discover that signing had such positive effects on learning to talk and on intellectual development, we believe very strongly that the most important benefits are emotional ones. As you will soon discover for yourself as you open this window into your baby’s mind, when you truly understand and communicate with someone, you feel more connected. Here are just a few of the specific ways this sense of connection benefits families…

Using signs with a baby….

• REDUCES tears, tantrums, and frustration
• ALLOWS babies to express needs and share their worlds
• ENRICHES interactions between adults and babies and strengthens the parent-child bond
• REVEALS how smart babies are and increases parents’ respect for them
• HELPS BUILD babies’ self-confidence and self-esteem

Who wouldn’t want these things for their baby? Who wouldn’t want to make even sweeter this magical time when babies are discovering the wonders of the world around them? That’s why all of us at Baby Signs® are so dedicated to helping families experience these joys – and more – for themselves.

For more information about Baby Signs® Programs and resources available to make signing fun and easy, visit us at www.babysignsmalaysia.com. Please contact Jamie Solomon at jamie@babysignsmalaysia.com or call her at +6(03)-80765936 to find out more.

Copyright (c) 2005 Baby Signs, Inc.

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Balloons are easily available and fun to play with. And they are cheap too! Why not have a game or two with your kids and at the same time foster a closer relationship with them through fun.

Here are the fun ideas you can play with balloons:

1. Static balloons. Rub a balloon with a piece of cloth to create enough static electricity to attract light objects like pieces of paper or hair.

2. Swinging balloons. Hang an inflated balloon on the ceiling with a rope. Let your toddler hit the balloon with hands. To get creative, you can show them to use a toy to hit the balloon (not the sharp ones!). Or you can even carry your child and use their legs to kick it.

3. Catch balloon. This is a simple game. Just throw the balloon to and fro without touching the ground. It’s quite a challenge though for toddlers.

4. A magical moment with balloons. Stun your kids with this trick: deflate a balloon without popping it. Blow up a balloon to its proper size. Tie off the balloon. Stick cellophane tape to the balloon, either side of it or top. Take a needle and pierce through the tape slowly and pull it out slowly.

5. Hide the balloon somewhere in the house. And ask your kids to find it.

6. Balloon rockets. Blow up a balloon and hold it tight at the opening. Then let it go off as a rocket. If you want, you can have a contest with your kids to see whose balloon travels the furthest.

7. Balloon faces. Use a felt tip marker pen to draw a face (smiley) on an inflated balloon. Draw different expressions.

8. Create animal balloons. I mean the long balloons a clown uses. For example, you can create a dog out of a balloon.

9. Popped balloons. Blow up balloons until they pop.

10. Teamwork. Stand face to face with your kid and put the balloon in between your bellies or chests. Without using your hands, move together toward a designated finishing line.

Bonus tip: Balloon balance. Try to balance the balloon on the end of the finger. Keep it in the air. Take turns with your kids. Or do it together and see who can keep it balanced and in the air the longest.

There you go. Get some balloons and let’s get cracking!

Sidenote: If you need to blow up many balloons at one go, say 100 or more, here’s an interesting way to tie up balloons without taking its toll on your fingers.

IMPORTANT: Never let your kids play with balloons when you’re not around. Dispose of deflated and burst balloons to avoid any choking hazards.
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After all these years of writing about attachment parenting on this Web site, it dawned on me a few days ago that we’ve never actually defined the phrase "attachment parenting". This point was reinforced when a new friend of mine commented that he’d read through the articles on this site, but that he still didn’t really get what attachment parenting actually was, even though he agreed completely on what it appeared we were using as our basic approach to parenting.

And so, let us define what we mean when we talk about attachment parenting — a phrase that we didn’t coin, by the way. I think William and Martha Sears, authors of The Attachment Parenting Book, might have come up with it, but in any case, it’s a good name for our general philosophy of parenting!

First off, the main elements of attachment parenting to us are: extended breast feeding, co-sleeping, non-violence towards children, and carrying or otherwise being with babies (especially newborns) every hour of the day. You can tell us attachment parenting types, actually, by the slings we use to tote our babies. 🙂

Underlying these ideas is the basic philosophy that parenting is about really loving each stage of your child’s life, from newborn to toddler, infant to kid, child to teen.

Rather than push newborns into a crib and separate room as fast as possible, attachment parenting folk believe that newborns and babies need to be as close to their parents as possible, even throughout the night. We believe that newborns even learn healthy sleeping and breathing patterns from sleeping close to their parents at night.

We, as well as the other AP parents we know, have had the experience of co-sleeping with a young newborn only to have them stop breathing for an increasingly noticeable period of time. If one of the parents takes a deep breath, in all cases it prompted the baby to breathe again and the breath rhythm was reestablished. Overall, we prefer to cuddle, hold, play with, and generally interact with our little babies as much as possible, day and night.

Pushing children to become independent from the earliest possible age is a definite trend in our society and has been for decades. Attachment parents don’t aspire to have our children become so independent so quickly.

Pushing independence from such a young age also tends to sever the deep attachment a child needs to feel with his or her parents, a connection that forms the foundation of trust and attachment for the rest of his or her life.

I can remember about six years ago a pal of mine telling me proudly how he and his wife had traveled to France for two weeks and that their five and eight year old children didn’t even miss them. He was proud of how independent they were. Me? I was horrified: while I want my kids to be independent and able to live their own young lives, I certainly also want them to miss me, to want to see me and show me what’s important to them every single day, to know that I’m there to protect and love them.

But it’s what we see as this "pushing away" trend that us attachment parenting folk are fighting. Name any element of parenting and I can show you how there’s an element of separation involved. From the shorter and shorter times that women breastfeed to the use of strollers instead of carrying babies, to cribs and separate nurseries at earlier and earlier ages.

We go even further from the mainstream by embracing Waldorf education too, and the anti-media philosophy that is a common underpinning of Waldorf. The truth is that our kids watch some TV (mostly at restaurants) but never in our house. Total TV and movie time, annually, for our kids? Probably 5-10 hours total. But that’s another long posting…

Are there challenges to attachment parenting? Oh yeah, there’s no question that it’s probably a lot more difficult than following the more contemporary parenting approach of TV and video game as babysitter, kids pushed into their own rooms as soon as possible, nannies, au pairs, childcare in lieu of having a parent at home with the children, etc., but for us, at least, this is the path that resonates with our hearts, that illuminates what we’re trying to accomplish on this most important of journeys, the journey to create a whole, responsible, engaged, loving adult.

Or, in our case, three.

Originally published here. Copyright 2007 by Dave Taylor, Apparenting.com
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