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Babies may not be philosophers, but they do have something on their minds. And a growing number of parents are joining baby sign-language classes to try to communicate with their children before they can speak.
While the babies in the classes have perfectly good hearing and will soon be talking, benefits claimed by proponents, which include a rise in IQ, are luring parents determined to give their children the best possible start.
"I think it solves a lot of frustration problems," said Jamaica Plain mom Shana Katzman, one of a half-dozen mothers gathered in Brookline on a recent afternoon for a signing class.
She said her 1-year-old daughter, Lucy, has mastered the signs for "moon," "more," and "drink."
This was the fifth class of a six-class series at Isis Maternity in Brookline, where tots are shown the signs for "book," "eat," "hurt," "dog," "cat," "milk," "bubbles," and "duck," just to name a few.
The Isis center, which opened a second branch last month in Needham, draws mothers from all over the area including Boston, Cambridge, Arlington, Wayland, and Medway.
Signing to babies who can hear is not new. Research on the subject dates to at least the 1980s. But it may be on the verge of going mainstream.
California-based Baby Signs Inc., the program that Isis Maternity uses, also made a deal in January with the much larger Gymboree Play & Music, which has 530 sites in 27 countries, to offer its signing classes at its Massachusetts locations.
And Diane Ryan, the founder of a Web-based company called KinderSigns.com, which provides baby signing information online, just last month signed a contract to write "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Teaching Your Baby to Sign," which is due out in the fall.
Locally, the classes have been popular, according to Isis Maternity cofounder Johanna Myers McChesney, who said interest here seems to be magnified by the large population of well-educated, older, first-time mothers.
"It's really just taken off," she said of the signing classes. "We can't keep enough of them on the schedule at our two locations."
Charlene Ching-Roy, a physician who lives in Jamaica Plain, is taking the class in Needham with her 1-year-old son, Isaac. She had been taking other classes at Isis and saw children signing.
"That sold me when I saw other kids doing it," she said. ''It would be great if we could communicate, so we'll see."
Linda Acredolo, cofounder of Baby Signs, is one of the best-known names in baby signing circles for her work on a $500,000 study funded by the National Institutes of Health in 1989.
Acredolo, who has a doctorate in child development, became interested in signing when, in 1982, she noticed her year-old daughter making up signs.
She did some research and discovered that most babies will make up a couple of signs on their own, but parents don't generally encourage it because they think it might impede verbal development, said Acredolo.
The NIH-funded study followed 103 babies. One-third of them were taught to sign and the rest were part of control groups. The children who signed showed stronger language development, according to Acredolo, and they had higher average IQs (by 12 points) by the time they were 8 years old. The results were published in 2000 in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.
"We found that the signing children were learning to talk sooner, not later," said Acredolo.
She believes that signing is to talking as crawling is to walking. Crawling gets babies excited about mobility, so they look for a better way to get around, just as signing gets them excited about communication before they find the world of spoken words, said Acredolo, who cowrote a book on the results in 1996, "Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk," which has sold half a million copies.
Catherine Snow, a professor specializing in language and literacy development at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, said that for some, baby signing is certainly "the luxury of excessive parenting."
But she also said there's no evidence that signing could delay language development and it could be helpful for children with some kind of verbal delay, such as that associated with autism.
Acredolo said she is interested in making the program available to low-income and teenage parents, and she plans to take that up in an informal talk with members of the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus this month.
Vincent Kiteley is the director of sales and marketing for another baby-signing business, Seattle-based Sign2Me, which is also based on academic research but exclusively uses American Sign Language.
He was critical of Baby Signs because it uses a mix of American Sign Language with new signs that are meant to be easier for tiny hands to make.
"In the same sense you wouldn't teach a made-up spoken language, we do not believe it's proper to make up a signing language," he said.
Children don't articulate words perfectly when they first start trying but learn to with help; the same is true of signs, said Kiteley.
By Lisa Kocian, Boston Globe
While the babies in the classes have perfectly good hearing and will soon be talking, benefits claimed by proponents, which include a rise in IQ, are luring parents determined to give their children the best possible start.
"I think it solves a lot of frustration problems," said Jamaica Plain mom Shana Katzman, one of a half-dozen mothers gathered in Brookline on a recent afternoon for a signing class.
She said her 1-year-old daughter, Lucy, has mastered the signs for "moon," "more," and "drink."
This was the fifth class of a six-class series at Isis Maternity in Brookline, where tots are shown the signs for "book," "eat," "hurt," "dog," "cat," "milk," "bubbles," and "duck," just to name a few.
The Isis center, which opened a second branch last month in Needham, draws mothers from all over the area including Boston, Cambridge, Arlington, Wayland, and Medway.
Signing to babies who can hear is not new. Research on the subject dates to at least the 1980s. But it may be on the verge of going mainstream.
California-based Baby Signs Inc., the program that Isis Maternity uses, also made a deal in January with the much larger Gymboree Play & Music, which has 530 sites in 27 countries, to offer its signing classes at its Massachusetts locations.
And Diane Ryan, the founder of a Web-based company called KinderSigns.com, which provides baby signing information online, just last month signed a contract to write "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Teaching Your Baby to Sign," which is due out in the fall.
Locally, the classes have been popular, according to Isis Maternity cofounder Johanna Myers McChesney, who said interest here seems to be magnified by the large population of well-educated, older, first-time mothers.
"It's really just taken off," she said of the signing classes. "We can't keep enough of them on the schedule at our two locations."
Charlene Ching-Roy, a physician who lives in Jamaica Plain, is taking the class in Needham with her 1-year-old son, Isaac. She had been taking other classes at Isis and saw children signing.
"That sold me when I saw other kids doing it," she said. ''It would be great if we could communicate, so we'll see."
Linda Acredolo, cofounder of Baby Signs, is one of the best-known names in baby signing circles for her work on a $500,000 study funded by the National Institutes of Health in 1989.
Acredolo, who has a doctorate in child development, became interested in signing when, in 1982, she noticed her year-old daughter making up signs.
She did some research and discovered that most babies will make up a couple of signs on their own, but parents don't generally encourage it because they think it might impede verbal development, said Acredolo.
The NIH-funded study followed 103 babies. One-third of them were taught to sign and the rest were part of control groups. The children who signed showed stronger language development, according to Acredolo, and they had higher average IQs (by 12 points) by the time they were 8 years old. The results were published in 2000 in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.
"We found that the signing children were learning to talk sooner, not later," said Acredolo.
She believes that signing is to talking as crawling is to walking. Crawling gets babies excited about mobility, so they look for a better way to get around, just as signing gets them excited about communication before they find the world of spoken words, said Acredolo, who cowrote a book on the results in 1996, "Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk," which has sold half a million copies.
Catherine Snow, a professor specializing in language and literacy development at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, said that for some, baby signing is certainly "the luxury of excessive parenting."
But she also said there's no evidence that signing could delay language development and it could be helpful for children with some kind of verbal delay, such as that associated with autism.
Acredolo said she is interested in making the program available to low-income and teenage parents, and she plans to take that up in an informal talk with members of the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus this month.
Vincent Kiteley is the director of sales and marketing for another baby-signing business, Seattle-based Sign2Me, which is also based on academic research but exclusively uses American Sign Language.
He was critical of Baby Signs because it uses a mix of American Sign Language with new signs that are meant to be easier for tiny hands to make.
"In the same sense you wouldn't teach a made-up spoken language, we do not believe it's proper to make up a signing language," he said.
Children don't articulate words perfectly when they first start trying but learn to with help; the same is true of signs, said Kiteley.
By Lisa Kocian, Boston Globe