Study title

Every week thousands of parents in the UK join BabySign classes in the belief that it will help their infant's development. Our research team has been conducting the first controlled longitudinal study to evaluate the benefits of gesturing with babies, yielding data that will contribute to the ongoing debate about the early linguistic advantages of gestural communication. However, the parents in our study have indicated that there are also non-linguistic advantages of using gestures to communicate. They believe their infants are more well-adjusted, and that they as parents are less stressed, as a result of using BabySign. At the same time, eminent researchers in the field have called for better scientific understanding of the wider effects of gesturing with infants. With the forthcoming study we will conduct a rigorous examination of these further effects. Measures of parenting characteristics that promote healthy development will determine whether parents using gestures fare better than controls and whether gesturing to infants produces a more 'contented' baby. Measures of mind-mindedness and parental interaction will assess the quality of the parent-infant relationship. This has implications for health care professionals working with families where there is a need to improve mother-infant interaction.