Baby sign language is such a fun way to help your baby communicate before he has the language skills to speak what he needs from you.

How To Start Using Baby Sign Language

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with starting, and you might be tempted to try ALL the signs (I’m speaking from personal experience) but you really only need a few signs for successful early communication. We tried all kinds of signs (dog, mom, help, please), and found that we only used a few. These are our favorites:

• All done

• More

• Milk

• Eat

• Thank You

We ended up used the baby sign language flash cards we bought only for the pictures, but they may be useful or fun for you!

Here’s Kate signing our favorite baby signs:

When To Start Using Baby Sign Language

You can start signing early on so that your baby gets used to seeing the signs and associating the sign with the word and action. Don’t give up if you don’t see any signing back - you’ll start to reap the rewards at around 8-9 months. We were especially thankful for the signs when our daughter was really trying to communicate (around 13-14 months) but didn’t have all the speech skills to tell us what she needed. Baby sign language significantly reduced everyone’s communication frustration.