Signing FAQs

Most children are not developmentally ready to speak until approximately 2 years of age. Babies are developmentally able to communicate with signs much earlier than that. Some studies indicate children as young as 5 to 6 months of age can communicate with limited signs. The inability to communicate can cause frustration and tantrums for both the parent and the child! Sign language is a wonderful tool that allows even very small children to express themselves. Most parents who sign with their babies talk about an unexplainable bond felt when their child communicates so early!

Obviously your child will be fine without learning to sign, but there are so many developmental and social benefits that they will have access to should you choose to do so.

Start signing now! You can sign "milk" to your newborn when it's time to nurse or bottle-feed. Sign "sleep" at nap and bedtimes. Take your baby's hands and help them sign "more" in between each spoonful. This will help integrate signs into your daily routine. Soon the repetition and reinforcement will occur naturally as your infant grows. Baby sign will also help your infant realize that crying is not the only way of communicating.

There are a few factors to consider: how early you start, how frequently or consistently you use signs, and the child's ability or developmental stage. If you start baby sign language with your newborn, she may not sign back until 8–14 months old. If you start with your 2-year-old, he may respond immediately, or it could take a couple of months. Many children have a "signing explosion" around 1.5 to 2 years. You will be amazed at how quickly they pick up signs.

If your child has physical, mental, or developmental delays, take that into consideration. Rachel Coleman's second daughter Lucy had no words and no signs and showed no interest in communication for her first two years. Rachel and her husband didn't give up — they continued exposing her to sign and speech, and suddenly she had a language explosion in both! Read Rachel's story.

Many parents fear that signing will delay or further delay speech. Our experience has been the opposite. If your goal is communication, signing will meet that need much earlier than speech. As Rachel Coleman has said: "When we found out Leah was deaf, many people warned us to be careful with signing. They said, 'If she gets too comfortable signing, she will never speak.' Their intentions were good, but they were absolutely wrong. Luckily, we first gave Leah a complete language in signs, only then was she able to take time to work on the skill of labeling those signs through her speech. English is a language. American Sign Language is a language. Spanish is a language. But speech — it is a skill… and Leah is a little chatterbox!"

Many tantrums and the "Terrible Twos" are directly linked to frustration about communication. There is less frustration when your child can augment their communication skills with signs that both of you can understand.

Parenting can be very overwhelming because there never seems to be enough time. This is why we created Signing Time. It does the work for you and makes ASL easy and fun for all ages. You don't have to learn an entire language. Even learning two or three key vocabulary words like MORE or MILK will be beneficial!

No, you don't (unless you have a really good reason to!). Signing Time provides parenting tools for communication through the use of American Sign Language. You may be surprised how useful it is to learn even a few signs.

If fluency is your goal, ASL, like any second language, takes time and practice. Surrounding yourself with others who are fluent will boost your skills and confidence. Check out your local Community Education Programs and Community Centers for the Deaf. Many schools and colleges now offer ASL as a world language. For teens and adults ready to go deeper, check out Sign It! American Sign Language Made Easy.

If you are going to make the effort to teach and reinforce signs for communication purposes, it makes sense to use signs that are part of a living language meaningful to hundreds of thousands of ASL users. Additionally, your child's caregivers — doctors, preschools, daycare centers, and elementary schools — are far more likely to use ASL than to learn individual made-up signs for each child.

Hearing children who start as "baby signers" can comfortably communicate with deaf children and adults, and take advantage of other ASL materials. They've also laid a foundation for studying ASL as a second language later. And many of our Deaf customers have noted that made-up signs run the risk of actually "saying" something unintended in ASL, leading to potentially humorous if not embarrassing situations.

You can fingerspell the entire name using the ASL alphabet. In the Deaf community, people are often given "name signs" — unique signs that represent a person's name. Name signs are traditionally given by someone who is Deaf and are shorter ways of expressing a name. It is not culturally acceptable to give yourself a name sign. Name signs are often the first letter of your name combined with a characteristic (physical, personality, or something you enjoy doing).

Most children adapt signs to whatever they are physically able to do. As their fine motor skills develop, their signs will also develop — very similar to the pattern in speech development: "Da-da" becomes "Daddy" or "Dad."

Learning a second language is fun and has many developmental benefits. ASL stimulates learning through different senses and is a blessing for children who are visual, spatial, or tactile learners. Learning a second language raises your child's IQ. One in ten Americans have some degree of hearing loss — knowing a few signs can give your child the confidence to engage with a deaf peer.

While our products were created for children ages 0–8, ALL ages love Signing Time because it makes ASL so easy and fun. We've heard from customers of all ages who have found remarkable uses for our products, including stroke patients who have lost their speech, parents of children adopted from other countries, and children with speech delays or disabilities. Sign language is a valuable tool at any age.

For tweens, teens, and adults ready to go deeper, check out Sign It! American Sign Language Made Easy. For more advanced content including ASL grammar and sentence structure, visit My Signing Time.

There's a lot of great research out there on this topic! Claire Vallotton, Ph.D. has made it easy with her white paper, Signing with Babies and Children.

The American Academy of Pediatrics released updated media guidelines for parents of infants and toddlers in 2016. Screen time that fosters interaction — such as video chats with grandparents and videos that help babies learn words — are among approved uses of media for babies. Read more.