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Comment by logfromblammo | Hacker News Reader

Also, teach your babies a subset of ASL, for words like "more", "eat", "drink", "milk", "water", "done", "diaper change", and "sleep". They can form word associations before they are able to speak intelligibly, and it really helps the parent figure out why TF the kid is crying.

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I taught my daughter about 100 words of ASL (English with and ASL lexicon, to be honest about it). Turned out super useful since she was a late talker (my second child, who I also tried to teach ASL was an early talker and thought ASL was stupid).

In my opinion, it's mostly useful because it's super cute. Typically kids who can sign 'milk' or 'more' can also indicate with grunts, grabs and reaching what the problem is. But it's super cute.

  Turned out super useful since she was a late talker

That might not be a coincidence. There's some evidence that kids who use sign language tend to talk later. Maybe because there's less incentive to verbalize. It's not a language delay, though.

Pretty sure the causation worked the other way, but it's hardly a repeatable experiment in my case.

Learn Dunstan baby language and you don't even have to teach your kid anything.

We did teach our kid "more", which was useful.

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