Has anyone used baby signing in bilingual family?

[knitty]

Well, trilingual actually.DD is 5 months and we are doing OPOL with her. We speak to each other in english though. I was thinking of introducing some baby signing to her, obviously coordinated with DH so we are using the same signs for same words in the respective languages.
Do you think that would just be too confusing or might the signs actually help her? I don't want to drive her mad!

Hi
Live in Spain in a Catalan-speaking area, Spanish-speaking hubby and I speak English! Did sign language with both babies and no confusion whatsoever!
Was great and really helped at times.
My tip for multi-language families......Always stick to one language per parent if you want your kids to keep them separate and speak both/all. If you all chop and change a lot, they pick one language to speak and refuse the other because they know you understand!!

Good to know that it worked for you,gives me more confidence to try it.
We keep having to remind each other to stick to our first languages when talking to her but we are getting better!

We did / are with dd and ds. We used OPOL and baby sign for some important words while they were pre-verbal. We made a vocab list for ourselves of which words we would sign with and what the signs would be, so that "more" for example would be the same sign no matter which parent was saying it in their language. This worked quite well for us. dd learned very quickly that there are 2 words for everything and never seemed to struggle with it. She still signs sometimes, to ds or to us.

I've done it with charges who weren't babies when the parents were on board. I think it really speeded up acquisition of English, which was very much a second language, and reduced communication problems. My command of their first language was pretty terrible so them using the sign when they didn't know the word in Enlgish, which is effectively what I was there to teach, reduced communication difficulties and frustration on both sides considerably!

I plan to do it with DC1 alongside OPOL.

heya, just wanted to add we do opol and baby signing and found it very useful, no confusion. go for it :)

I tried it in a limited way but gave up quite quickly - it takes a lot of discipline to keep using the signs and encourage others too aswell. I probably taught fewer than 20 signs and only 4 or 5 really stuck long term. Even with so little though, it was useful. The major win was getting through potty training at 18 months when he couldnt speak a word!

Our sing and sign teacher was herself bringing up her daughter bilingually in Spanish/English, she was obviously very into signing and her daughter knew loads of signs, really helped the rest of us communicate with her as she was speaking lots more Spanish early on but was understandable because of the signs, and certainly didn't seem to lead to any confusion.