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Children of an early age have a desire to communicate their needs and wishes, but lack the ability to do so clearly. This often leads to frustration and tantrums. With practice parents, infants and toddlers can communicate fluently and clearly. Hand-eye coordination is easier than the coordination of speech, which requires coordinating the lips, tongue, breath, and vocal chords simultaneously. By using simple signs for common words such as "eat", "sleep", "more", "hug", "play", "cookie", "teddy bear", etc., infants can learn to express their needs before they are able to produce understandable speech. Babies in deaf families, immersed in a signing environment, use simple signs from as early as 6 weeks. Some parents feel that they don't have enough time to teach their baby sign language, but by using sign with each other in front of the baby, they will need to spend little time in actual instruction. PopularityUse of baby sign language is growing, but still not widespread, partially due to the fear that children who sign will not learn to speak properly later on. However, all available research shows that hearing children who sign as infants go on to develop particularly rich spoken vocabularies, as well as a tendency to solve problems through communication rather than tantrums. They may also teach sign to younger siblings after they themselves have switched to speaking with their parents.
Language OriginsA small set of signs are usually adopted first, based of common objects and terms, that would be familiar to the child's everyday life. These signs should be adopted from the local sign language. For example, in Australia, the signs are adopted from AUSLAN (which stands for AUStralian Sign LANguage); in America ASL (American Sign Language) signs would be used, and so on. The indigenous sign language is used with infants, even if the intention is not to continue signing after the child begins to articulate as it is the sign language universally used within the area. Other baby signers will be able to, thus, understand and communicate with the baby using these signs, as will the childcare center and so on. Parents who have some enthusiasm for sign language may already know the local adult signs for "eat", "sleep", "more", "play". It is common for parents to teach their babies non-simplified signs from adult sign language such as American Sign Language rather than specialized, or made up Baby Sign.
Need BasedNeed based signing focuses on basic needs, such as signs for "drink", "food", "sleepy", "hot"/"cold", "change me", etc. "Drink" or "thirst" can be expressed by mimicking drinking out of a bottle. "Eating" could be expressed by making a similar motion, or by rubbing one's stomach.
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