Teaching Baby Sign Language Before Speech

Parenting Starts Before Birth And Not With A Newborn Baby’s Birth

When I first came across this idea I knew instinctively that it made sense. In the modern world we usually think that parenting starts sometime after the newborn baby arrives. This is because we used to believe that the unborn baby and even a newborn baby had no experiences which could be remembered. We know now through modern technology that this is not true. Unborn babies can feel and react to their prenatal experiences. So pregnancy should be though of as an important part of parenting.

There are three parts to this:-creating a healthy physical environment, creating a healthy emotional environment and stimulating your baby with touch, sound and music before birth.  Some may find these ideas hard to understand as they think of the unborn baby and even the newborn baby as a blank slate not yet capable of interacting with their environment or communicating.

It is easy to see how the physical health and diet of the mother will affect the baby. Anything the mother eats and drinks will affect the baby. If the mother takes drugs, too much alcohol or not enough of the right nutrients then I think we would all agree that this will damage the development of the newborn baby. Deficiencies in vitamins such as folic acid caused malformation of the neural tubes which can result in spinal bifida and anencephaly.  This is well documented.

The affect of the emotional health of the mother on the unborn and newborn baby is also becoming more understood. Mothers who suffer from depression during pregnancy have depressed anxious babies. A mother who experiences anger, fear and aggression will release hormones into her blood stream which will have a negative impact on her newborn baby’s mood.

Thanks to modern methods of observation we can now see into a baby’s unborn world for the first time and observe what is actually happening to the baby in the womb before birth. Ultra sound scans and other methods of looking at the baby in the womb have shown that babies can react to all sorts of stimulation and also initiate movements and reactions which express the baby’s needs, interest and feelings.

Did you know that twins have been shown expressing ‘body language’ with each other before birth? They have been shown kissing, holding hands, playing, kicking and hitting each other. Ultrasound scans have shown that at between 16-18 weeks, during amniocentesis tests, babies heart rates have increased and some babies have been shown to ‘attack’ the needle if it accidentally nicked them as if trying to protect themselves. Babies have withdrawn from their normal activity rate for hours or even days after the test. Amazingly, did you know some babies have been heard crying in the womb if air gets to the baby’s larynx in a process called ‘vagitus uterinus’?

Babies can hear in the womb and respond by kicking to music and touch stimulation. After birth, a newborn baby will show a response to a familiar song or music heard in the womb. A newborn baby has already begun to learn language in the womb. It has been shown using something called an acoustic spectrograph that the cry of a newborn baby already has rhythms, patterns and other speech features which can be matched to their mother’s voice!  A newborn baby shows a preference for listening to adults speaking its mother tongue rather than a foreign one.  A newborn baby can match a sound track to the face speaking it showing a newborn baby has lip reading skills. And a newborn baby can read a face so well that they can imitate a wide open mouthed expression, a sticking out tongue and mimic expressions such as sadness, happiness and surprise. So the message is clear parenting must start before

About the Author

Julie Ashton-Townsend is a teacher and reading coach devoted to making every child a reader. Http://www.julieashtontownsend.com She has three children all of whom could read well before school age. She has written extensively on reading and early learning both before and after birth. http://www.readingfrombirth.com has an early reading program for babies which teaches important reading skills through fun games and reading activities.

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