The first 10 signs to teach a baby

The temptation, once you decide to try signing, is to learn forty signs in a weekend. Don’t. A baby learns a sign because it gets them something — the bottle, the next spoonful, being picked up. Signs for things they don’t care about go nowhere, no matter how diligently you model them.

So the list below is ordered by usefulness to the baby, not by how easy it is for you. Start with the first three or four. Add more only once one of those has come back.

Start with these

How to actually teach them

The mechanics matter more than the list:

• Say the word every time you sign it. The sign never replaces the word. This is why signing doesn’t delay speech — you are giving your baby two channels for the same meaning, not swapping one for the other.
• Sign at the moment of meaning. “Milk” as the bottle comes into view, not while you’re boiling the kettle and not ten minutes later. Babies work out what a sign means from what happens immediately after it.
• Repeat far more than feels reasonable. Most babies need to see a sign dozens of times, across weeks, before it comes back. It will feel like nothing is happening. That is the normal experience of week two.
• Then pause and wait. Offer the bottle, hold it, look expectant, count to five in your head. The gap is where their sign appears. Parents who never leave a gap wait much longer for a first sign.
• Accept approximations. A baby’s “more” is usually two fists bashing together, and their “milk” is a vague squeeze. Count it. Respond to it immediately, and keep modeling the accurate version alongside.

If you only take one thing from this page: three signs, used at the exact moment they mean something, beats thirty signs practiced at story time.

When to add the next one

Add a new sign when one of your current three starts coming back, or when one of them has clearly stalled and isn’t motivating (nobody signs “please” at seven months). Rotating a stalled sign out is not giving up — it’s just moving to something your baby has a reason to say.

After the first ten, the natural next tier is people (grandma, grandpa, baby), feelings (happy, sad, hurt) and the things in their day they most want — bubbles, book, outside, dog.

Next: when do babies actually start signing back? →