Usually between eight and twelve months — and usually a few weeks after you were ready to give up.
The honest answer is that it varies enormously, and the variation says almost nothing about your baby. What it mostly tracks is when you started, how often the sign appears at a moment that matters, and whether your baby has developed the fine motor control to make a recognizable shape yet.
Starting later is not a problem. A baby who starts at eleven months often signs back within a two weeks, because the motor skills and the concept are both already there. If you’re reading this with a one-year-old, you haven’t missed anything.
This is where most parents get stuck: they’re waiting for the sign in the illustration, and what they get is a vague flap.
Real first signs look like this — two fists bashed together for “more”, one hand opening and closing anywhere near the chest for “milk”, a single flappy wave for “all done”, a hand jammed at the mouth for “eat”. They are approximations, they’re inconsistent, and half the time you’ll wonder if it was deliberate.
Respond to it as if it were perfect. Give them the thing, say the word, make the accurate sign back. That loop — attempt, immediate result, correct model — is what turns a flap into a sign. Withholding until the shape is right teaches nothing except that hands don’t work.
The test isn’t whether the shape is right. It’s whether they made it on purpose, to get something, more than once.
Then nothing is happening on schedule. Four to eight weeks of consistent modeling before a first sign is the ordinary experience, and the first two of those weeks feel completely pointless. Keep going.
The single most common fix. Parents model beautifully and then hand over the bottle immediately, so the baby never has a reason to produce anything. Offer, hold, look expectant, count to five. Leave the gap.
“Please” and “thank you” are for you, not for them. Swap in something they actively want — milk, more, up, bubbles, the dog. Motivation does more work than repetition.
A sign made while you’re fetching the bottle from the kitchen teaches nothing. It has to happen with the thing present, at the moment of wanting.
If you’ve been modeling ten signs, none of them is getting enough repetitions to stick. Three, hard, beats ten, occasionally.
Early signs are easy to read as random movement. Watch specifically at the two or three moments each day when the sign would be relevant — that’s where an intentional one shows up.
No — provided you say the word every time you make the sign, which is the whole method. Signing gives a baby a second channel for meaning while the mouth catches up; it doesn’t give them a reason to stop trying to talk. Parents who report “my baby signed and then talked late” and parents who report “my baby signed and then talked early” are both describing normal variation in when children start talking.
What signing reliably does is reduce frustration in the window where a baby knows exactly what they want and has no way to say it. That is worth doing on its own terms, whatever it does or doesn’t do to the timing of first words.
Signing is a nice-to-have, not a diagnostic. If you have concerns about your child’s hearing, speech, or how they communicate generally — not making eye contact, not responding to their name, losing skills they had — that is a conversation for your pediatrician or a speech-language pathologist, and it is not something a signing app should be answering.
Baby Signs logs what you showed and what they signed back, so you can see progress in the weeks when it doesn’t feel like there is any — and it dates your baby’s first sign for you.
Open the app← Read next: the first 10 signs to teach a baby
Baby Signs