Early Intervention and Baby Signs in Brief

Hi Kristin (and other interested parties). Here's a link to the history of Early Intervention in NYC. I know Dan and Betsy are familiar with it because she worked for a similar system in Boston.

Basically, it's a safety net to catch kids with problems while it's still early enough to help them the most. We don't really need it since we're well educated about potential issues (like hearing deficits), Caleb gets excellent primary care from his pediatrician, and we could pay out of pocket if we absolutely had to, but it's a great service to those who don't have those kind of supports in place. It is nice for us, too, since Caleb's insurance doesn't cover speech therapy. It would be a significant cost for us. (Of course, we did "pre-pay" through our taxes.)

Because we went through the system, we had about ten meetings, all a week apart, before Caleb was approved and services started. By then, he'd started talking. He's still a little behind where they'd like him to be, so I think they'd continue anyway. But I'm confident by his first assessment, they'll consider him back on track and will discontinue the services. We're moving to Kansas, so we'd be stopping them anyway. We just don't have to worry about finding a therapist after we move.

As for the signing, it is supposed to be a way for babies to express wants and needs before their physically capable of speaking. The idea is to curb frustration that babies feel because they know what they want to communicate, but they don't have the ability to actually communicate it.

All the documented research that I've found says that babies who use signs actually speak earlier than babies who don't - perhaps because signing encourages adults to speak more with them and therefore increases spoken interaction and opportunities to learn. Our pediatrician isn't sure. Personally, I wonder if there are different populations of signers. For example, Caleb was way ahead in his motor skills, sitting, cruising, crawling and walking early on the spectrum. Perhaps he liked focusing on getting around and depended on the signs to get him by while he was too busy to learn to speak.

We did stop using the signs and he started talking more. (The speech therapist suggested by not responding so quickly to his signs, we'd give him more incentive to talk.) I'm not sure if it really made a difference or if he would have started talking anyway. He says lots of words he never learned signs for, like turtle, and still does the sign for most of the words he has signs for, like apple and more. I can say that the screeching decreased whenever Caleb learned a sign for something he wanted, like Clementines. For that reason alone, despite the potential for later talking (which I admittedly doubt), we plan to sign with the next kid.

The BLD blog has a lot of archives.