Baby Signs® is specifically designed for hearing babies aged 0-3 years old and rather than being based on adult sign language, it uses a combination of "baby friendly" symbolic gestures and some universal sign language as used in AUSLAN, ASL and BSL.

Although many of the Baby Signs® signs are generically used in AUSLAN (such as bath, baby, eat, sleep, book, car etc), researchers and founders of Baby Signs found that many of the official signs normally used by the deaf community were a little too complex for baby to adopt based on their development and limited dexterity.  Many of the deaf community signs are also very similar and are dependent on whether you use your right or left hands, rotate clockwise vs. anti clockwise - making it confusing for baby to understand and use. 

Baby Signs® recognised this and further developed signs that are symbolic based (parent or baby would naturally gesture).  For example, the sign for ‘finished’ in AUSLAN Baby Hands is described as “with a closed fist and thumb extended, rotate hand in a Left to Right movement”.  Baby Signs® uses a more natural symbolic gesture for ‘finished’- “swipe hands away as if pushing something away”.  This is instinctively a movement that baby does when they push something like a plate away when finished.

Baby Sign Language should be simple enough to be useful for the short period of time before toddlers can communicate with words. This encompasses a period of approximately 6 -36 months.  Children stop using signs as they speak more words, so the “baby signs” are meant to be temporary.  The exception to this is if the child has a specific need to continue their signing journey beyond speech development, then traditional adult sign language would be recommended.

It is this ease of use, that we believe attributes to the world wide success and use of Baby Signs® program.  There are some other attributes of our program which we are particularly proud of and which, we feel, make our program and products stand out from the crowd.

Original Research: The Baby Signs® Program is a natural extension of 25 years of research documenting the benefits of encouraging hearing babies to use signs before they can talk.  For example, it is our research paper that many signing programs cite when they talk about how signing facilitates rather than hinders learning to talk.  It was in the course of this research that we discovered the most effective strategies for teaching babies to sign, strategies that we have implemented in our products and programs.

A Wide Variety of Extremely High Quality Products: We are particularly proud of the resources we have created to help parents incorporate signing into their daily routine.  The DVDs deserve particular note because of their exceedingly high production qualities.  State-of-the-art character animation, real babies doing the signs, funny monkey puppets, and child-friendly music all combine to make our DVDs not only effective in teaching signs directly to babies, but also enormously entertaining.

Firm Developmental Foundation: With Ph.D. degrees in child development, and more than 45 years (combined) of research and university teaching experience in the field, we have been able to create signing programs and products that are designed to be maximally effective with children under 3.

Intellectual and emotional development:  These lessons are drawn from our 2nd and 3rd best-selling parenting books (the first being Baby Signs), entitled Baby Minds: Brain-Building Games Your Baby Will Love and Baby Hearts: A guide to Giving Your Child an Emotional Head Start.  Our DVDs provide another example.  In contrast to many signing videos marketed for babies, ours are carefully designed to take into account the processing capacities of very young children: the pace is slow, the images simple, the signs are repeated many times, and the number of signs is limited so as not to overwhelm babies with too much information at one time.

Flexible Approach: Although the great majority of the signs we recommend have been drawn from ASL and AUSLAN (because we recognise the value of a bridge to the deaf community), we recognise that the bottom line for any family is successful communication.  We, therefore, make sure parents know that they are free to choose whatever signs work best for them and their child.  This position contrasts sharply with the strict AUSLAN-only philosophy that characterises several of our main competitors.

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