Hand Gestures And Parent Talk Help Babies To Learn

What Do Hand Gestures Do For Baby's Learning?

The Week of March 6, 2009 reports that when parents talk with their infants, hand gestures lead to smarter babies. No, really!

"Just as babies crawl before they learn to walk, they use gestures as a steppingstone toward speech.

"Now, a study at the University of Chicago has determined that babies who use more gestures end up with bigger vocabularies once they begin to talk.

"Scientists have long known that kids with more educated and affluent parents enter school with better verbal skills, largely because their parents talk to them more and use more complex sentences.

"But what they didn't realize is that this parent-child interaction matters just as much before the child begins to use words.

"Psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith Rowe observed children in their homes as they grew from gurgling infants to talking toddlers. They found that kids with more educated parents used nearly twice as many gestures to communicate as kids in the poorer homes.

"The precess works like this: A baby points to his sippy cup, and a parent points, too, saying, 'juice.' When the kids points to his bed, the parent says 'bed,' and so on.

"'That's a teachable moment,' Goldin-Meadow tell Time. 'Mothers are teaching the kids the word for an object.'"

Men Have Been Pointing Instead Of Speaking For Years

OK… so this is NOT the same thing as a man pointing to his next beer and grunting.

Once you have the baby's attention and it wants something, it is open for a lesson to be taught… so speaking the word as you point as well imparts a lesson and it's easy to do.

So all those times your mother said, "It's not polite to point," she may have been holding back your education.

Ahhhh, you KNEW it was your mother's fault, didn't you. (Hey, just kidding, Mom!)

Best,

Charlie Seymour Jr
A Work At Home Dad, succeeding in this economy

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