If you’ve ever seen the comedy movie Meet the Fockers, you’ve seen baby sign language. It’s the one where Robert De Niro teaches his grandson how to sign for milk.
Kildare woman Claire Glynn was first introduced to baby sign language 20 years ago, by a cousin who lived in the US. There, teaching babies to communicate with their hands, long before their mouths are able to sound out words, was already a well-established practice.
“When my niece was signing for ‘more’, ‘again’, and ‘milkies’, I thought it was amazing,” says Glynn.
By the time her own third child was born, she was so intrigued by the prospect of being able to communicate with him early that she began signing to him even before she left the maternity ward.
“Babies can understand and respond to sign language from four months,” explains Glynn. Once established, the skill only lasts for a short window of time, typically between six months and a year. “When the words come, the signs fall away,” she explains.
During that window, however, it can ensure a baby gets its needs met more easily, reducing frustration and tears for both infant and parent.
Glynn’s baby was able to sign from five months. By eight months he was even able to sign that he wanted “to do a poop in his potty”, she says, a welcome milestone for both parties.
“It’s not language acquisition, it is signs for the words that are needed most, such as ‘nappy’, ‘wet’ and ‘more’. These are the words which are most relevant to a baby,” explains Glynn, who went on to write a baby sign language book, based on Irish Sign Language, which was published last year.
Ever the practical mother, it’s a bright and colourful board book with rounded edges, so parents can learn from it and babies can safely put it in their mouth. It is available in bookshops nationwide and there are two more already in gestation.
Now that her youngest child is six years old, Glynn is devoting more time to her business, Clever Little Handies. That includes teaching baby sign classes in public libraries and working with parent and baby groups which she loves because, as a new mum once herself, she recalls how isolating a time it can be and the value of peer support.
That is what led her to develop her Clever Little Handies teaching programme, on a franchise basis. It provides other parents with the tools and know how to host baby sign language classes of their own, offering them a way to generate income at a time and in a way that might suit their family life, just as it did hers.
As a member of Enterprise Nation, a community of small businesses and business advisers which manages Three’s Grants for Small Business programme, Glynn saw an ad for the awards in its newsletter, and immediately applied.
Winning had a huge impact. The cash element enabled her to study a course in matrescence, a subject that studies the physical, psychological and emotional changes a woman goes through after the birth of a child. That knowledge has helped inform her programmes.
She used the rest of the cash to pay an illustrator for her second baby sign book, which is based on nursery rhymes.
“I also got €5,000 worth of products, including a Galaxy Z Fold 5. It opens out like a tablet and is just brilliant to hand around after a class to get people to sign up for my newsletter. It generates lots of interest because it’s so quirky, and everyone signs up on the spot, which is great. The bill is paid for a year, and I got a virtual landline for the business as well,” she explains.
Most invaluable of all is that winning the grant feels like a seal of approval.
“It’s hard to explain the impact of winning an award for your business when you are starting out and feeling impostor syndrome,” says Glynn. “You have to be so self-motivated and fight doubts all along the way, and that internal voice that says, ‘Who do you think you are?’ Winning just helps you get out of your own way.”