With the release of “Meet the Fockers” in late December 2004, a new trend has started to evolve in mommies and infants nationwide.

Infant Sign Language has been a topic that was address on the cover of Life magazine recently, and has been on every morning news show within the last month.

Nancy Cadjan, a BYU graduate who created Sign Babies Flash Cards and an Infant Sign Language instructor in Orem, said Infant Sign Language is growing right now.

Parents started to show an interest and get involved about 5-7 years ago with ISL, when a book, “Sign With Your Baby” by Joseph Garcia, was released, Cadjan said. She said she thinks this is when parents started to realize the powerful effects of Infant Sign Language and began to learn how they could actually sign with their babies.

After seeing Robert De Niro’s character Jack Bynes sign with Little Jack in “Meet The Fockers,” Infant Sign Language created a buzz in Hollywood.

Many stars and musicians started using it with their own children and it continued to spread, Cadjan said.

Jackie Finnagin, from Los Angeles and mother of 24-month-old Delaney, first got interested in baby signing when she was introduced to the idea through an article she read in a baby magazine.

When she read the article, Finnagin noticed many mothers felt a closer bond with the children they signed with, and felt that it would be beneficial in her daughter’s intellectual development as well as communication between Delaney and her parents.

“We started signing videos with Delaney at 6 months, I would sign with Delaney all throughout the day,” Finnagin said, “She started signing on her own at about 10 months.”

The best age to start Infant Sign Language is generally between 6 to 8 months, or when they begin to focus their attention for about five to ten seconds, Cadjan said. It may take a couple months or a couple weeks, but at 12 months almost all babies have the manual dexterity to sign.

“You don’t need a program, but it’s often hard to learn a 3-dimensional action from a 2-dimensional material,” Cadjan said.

She said she believes classes are beneficial, but suggests going to the local library, or a parent information resource center, which are in every city in Utah, to check out the Sign With Your Baby Program, which gives some good basics.

Some believe baby signing has not received the necessary research to be recognized as legitimate.

Clyde Robinson, a professor of marriage, family, and human development, said in an e-mail he is not aware of any reliable research that addresses this issue.

“Personally, my experience in the discipline of child development makes me skeptical about the values of hearing baby’s learning to sign,” Robinson said. “There are many topics like this that are esoteric and faddish in nature that are not based upon sound research, but are based merely upon the opinions of a few individuals (though well meaning) who are biased in a narrow area.”

Cadjan’s beliefs contradict this theory.

She said the National Institute of Health did 20 years of research in which it followed up on the children until the age of 16, and found that Infant Sign Language in hearing children did not slow down their rate of speech, Cadjan said. In a small percentage it increased their speech rate so they spoke sooner and increased the IQ of the group by 12 points.

Finnagin said she noticed her daughter, Delaney, seems to be more advanced than other children in her playgroup and seems to throw fewer tantrums since she has started signing.

“I have had a couple parents come tell me that Delaney seems to understand things quicker and seems to be more calm,” Finnagin said. “I feel that Infant Sign Language probably played a role in that.”

“It’s a multi-sensory experience,” Cadjan said.

Children who are signed to, get more interested in books because that kind of experience becomes multi sensory to them as well, Cadjan said.

“If you talk, and you sign, and you read, and you make the sounds, you are getting all your children’s senses involved,” she said, “It’s truly an incredible thing to do with your baby.”



Copyright Brigham Young University 24 Mar 2005