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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

As a parent of three kids, total waste of time. For one, ASL isn't the only way to communicate with signs, and it's not the most efficient way to communicate with signs with kids -- they'll develop their own ways of signaling what they want. It's more of a parlor trick than anything else -- "Look what my kid can do!". I've got 3 kids and they were all very good at communicating what they want. We taught a few signs to our oldest kid, but it wasn't any easier to figure out what he wanted, and by the time he was using them effectively, he was basically talking already, we didn't bother with the other two.

(Going to clarify a bit: If the purpose is to communicate better with your kids before they can talk, it's a waste of time. Learning ASL is a valuable thing to do for many other reasons.)

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This goes against fairly general advice that I’ve received from early intervention specialists, including for my own child (not diagnosed as neurodivergent, just speech delayed).

In our case the kid picked up signs we were teaching him (not ASL, just intentional signs) weeks before corresponding words, and there are still words he signs and understands but can’t pronounce. The point was to introduce expressive language for functional concepts (hunger, wanting help, wanting to be picked up, etc.), and beyond its role as a precursor to spoken words, it absolutely made our lives easier.

It’s a well known phenomenon that the ability to pronounce words lags behind the ability to express “language”. Your kids clearly didn’t need it, but it’s still a useful tool.

Consider for a moment that maybe your experience isn't universal. I took both of mine to baby sign classes and both were able to communicate things such as hungry, tired, milk, nappy etc long before they were able to talk. Along with other parents at the same classes it was absolutely not a waste of time in terms of being able to communicate better with the children before they could talk.

It doesn't need to be a formal sign language, but intentionally developing systematic hand based communication with infants and other caretakers is pretty useful.

Using ASL signs as the base means you may have a better chance of others understanding, which is great (unless you're using signs to communicate base running strategy).

Lots of kids can communicate a little earlier with hands than speech, and there's lots of situations where hands are visible but speech is inaudible. More tools for communication is usually better.

My kiddo is 13 now, and speech is usually more convenient, but we still use a couple systematic signs (shaken t for toilet, all done), and the experience of looking for signs is helpful in a crowded place even when using ad-hoc signs.

That said. Like all parenting advice, try things out, if it sticks, keep using it. If not, no worries, nothing fits all.

We’ve had great experiences with teaching the babies we’ve had sign language.

You just need 3 signs, More, All done and something for feed me.

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