Living with Childhood Apraxia of Speech

I toyed with teaching my son baby signs, but never really kept with it. I really wish I had. If I had, would have skipped nearly a year of mounting frustrations. We would have been able to communicate.

I can't begin to explain how excited my son and I were when he signed something to me and I responded appropriately. If I remember right, he signed that he was hungry and wanted a cracker. The level of frustration on both our parts immediately dropped. We both understood that even if my son never spoke a word, I could hear him loud and clear through sign language.

His speech pathologist was the one who first recommended the Signing Times videos. I was shocked at how quickly my son picked up the signs. Within a week he was signing Mama, water, drink, hungry, cracker, apple...within a few weeks he was signing an amazing amount of words.

There is a school of thought that teaching your baby (or late talker or speech impaired child) will delay speech even further. Not true!! What is really does is teach your child language and communication skills that will translate into speech skills when they are ready to start talking. If you have a child with a speech impairment and your child's speech therapist or teachers are saying that sign language will just further delay speech, I bed you not to listen to them.

Think about this - what's worse: your child screaming, hitting, acting out in frustration that no one understand him/her, or the very slight possibility that communicating through sign language will delay speech by maybe a month or two? It's a no brainers!

Rachel, the creator of the Signing Times videos, has a deaf child (Lucy). She first created these videos as a fun and easy way to teach kids ASL so that hearing and deaf children could communicate. The videos have now expanded to including specialty videos for teaching babies sign language, a series of videos for helping teach daily living and communication skills to Down Syndrome children, and a series designed specially for childcare and preschool organizations.

The videos are fun for kids (and not boring for adults!). It's pretty easy to pick up the signs (don't get freaked out by Rachel's blue and orange band-aids - they are there to help you figure out which fingers she's using to make the signs!). The videos follow a natural progression from signs for basic needs (hungry, drink, mom, dad, etc) to more complicated concepts (such as school, pencil, read, etc). There are also flash cards and books available.

If you have a young child who is struggling to communicate, I highly recommend you get at least the first two or three of these videos and really work to get a basic line of communication going with your child. You'll be amazed at the difference it will make in your relationship.

I also highly recommend these videos for anyone with a baby. If I had known about these videos, or at the very least had worked harder on teaching my son baby signs, I don't think we would have ever experienced the level of frustration and early behavior problems that we did. He'd still have CAS, but we would have had a leg up on communication!