I am here at the start of a new blog, there is a blank sheet in front of me that needs to be filled with ideas. I didn’t start this blog on a whim, something inspired me to write. I don’t want to start with the name of the blog or a justification of why this blog exists, it just does; accept it. It will become whatever it will become.
I want to start with Emma and Grace. Emma is a new Mum and she gave birth to Grace just 5 months ago. When Emma was heavily pregnant last year, I offered to provide BSL tuition for the office staff – Emma just loved it. To inspire her, I suggested the idea of ‘baby signs‘ and gave her a spiel of benefits. To be honest, baby signs are a bit of a fad. Learning a few signs for milk, sleep, eat, like, and don’t like are not going to turn children into little Einsteins. But there is an inspiration for a parent to communicate with a child before the development of speech. If anything helps a parent to watch and observe children’s attempt to communicate more closely, it can only be a good thing.
Before you run to the cliff and jump into the chasm of wild statements, I am not talking about deaf children; I want to talk about all children. The children who try to tell parents their needs, and when it fails, they cry, scream and throw a tantrum. We must accept that tantrums are just another form of communication, more alarming because of the urgency and because the previous attempts to communicate had failed.
Jean Piaget is someone who understands something about children, about their cognitive development. How a child develops their association with the world. It is Piaget who understood the terrible twos; when the child perceives a world that revolves around them. He also observed how this stage moves to another, to a stage of relationships and relating with members of the family and others. The child moves from ‘egocentric’ to ‘sociocentric’ stages in psychological development.
Piaget went further to describe how a child has four different stages of development: sensorimotor (putting objects in the mouth in order to sense them); preoperational (developing motor skills through magical thinking); concrete operational (using motor skills logically); and formal operational thinking (developing abstract thoughts). As you can see, the four stages moves through the ages of 0 to 16 onwards. The stages happen to us all, and it can’t be avoided.
Even further than that, the four stages are typical of evolutionary development of mankind. It was William Stokoe who made the link between signed language and evolution. The utilisation of objects, or tools, is something we can associate with human evolution, when early human beings used tools kill their hunt. The increased amount of protein in the early human’s diet, led to the next stage, and so forth.
Sign language is also a tool. It is a tool of communication and expression of ideas, a language. Stokoe expressed the idea that early human beings most probably used a signed language of some form, before the development of vocal chords and the brain’s ability to make complex sounds and recognise them.
This thinking reminds me of my nephew, Daniele. At just 6 months old, I saw his hands change from gently moving in the air to purposefully touching his face with small fists. I tried to imagine, what would that sensation represent; what is that big object that touches a baby’s face. I realised that it was most probably the most important object in his life, his mother’s breast. I warned his mother that Daniele was asking for a feed, but she did what every mother would do, ‘I’ll just wait until he starts crying.’ Lo and behold, just 30 seconds later; Daniele started screaming. Daniele’s hands, his tools for communication, was reaching out to the world, but no-one was watching.
As much as signed language was an important step in the evolution of human beings, signed language is also an important step in the cognitive development of children. It is in the sensorimotor period of development at the ages of 0 to 2 years old, when movement and senses are closely entwined. A parent needs to learn how to watch these movements and interpret them into expressions of needs and desires, and respond to them. A parent could learn how to express simple ideas in signed language and relate them to real objects, in the same way that a child assimilates objects through their mouth.
Baby signing has a danger of becoming a fad. But if we go back to our evolutionary roots to sign and watch, before the child can hear and speak, parents are playing a crucial part in their child’s development.
