Parent Thread

Work gives 3 months paid leave, without having to use any sick/vacation time to get paid for it to all women.

As a dude, I have to take FMLA, and burn all my sick/vacation to get paid for it, otherwise it's up to 12 weeks, the FMLA limit.

F'ing stupid and unfair. Sorry women, I know you go through a lot, but I feel it should be equal.

As for formula, my wife's life improved 100% after we just said F it and started using formula 100%. Wife's supply dried up after returning to work at 6 weeks from stress or whatever. Had no choice. I could then help, and made life just so much easier.

I know there's been probably pages and pages of talk on baby sign language, so if someone doesn't want to repost, maybe they can PM me, but my son is nearly 10 months old, and doing great, but I feel like I missed the boat on this sign language stuff.

Can I start now, so he can tell me that he's hungry?

Our lactation consultant said the same bullshit about our daughter being tongue tied. We brought it to our doctor and he laughed and said that's basically what they all say and the first line of defense after the baby not latching well. He took one look at her and said it was so minor that he would never do it even if we asked him to and that we'd have trouble finding another doctor who would.

Damn phone double post

joeboo_sl said:

While having several months off sure is nice, who the heck works at a job where you can take half a year off and it doesn't cause a major problem? A while back I read that there was 1 European country(Germany maybe?) that allowed a full year for maternity leave. How would an employer deal with that, they'd have to actually hire someone to fill positions while people were gone on maternity leave, that's nuts. Unless you're like a fry cook at McDonalds or something, most people can't disappear for a year and step right back in like nothing happened.

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yeah funny shit, how do we do it? It just can't work, except it does.

Basically, what Izo already said.

OneofOne_sl said:

Irongut

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I wish I was trolling. Me and the wife are getting ready to start working on kid #2 You'd think with all the time we've been stuck inside with our son, unable to leave because it is 0 degrees out, that I'd have already scheduled a vasectomy.

All kidding aside (pun intended) chasing my 14 month old around is better than a gym membership. And a lot more fun.

Honest question does sign language help them develop speach sooner or would it delay it because they don't have as much incentive to talk since they can already communicate?

It helps them develop speech with a wider vocabulary more quickly. It also helps them with frustration due to not being able to communicate.

I'm looking into it right now, and there is about a million things on the net, and Amazon. Trying hard to figure out where to start.

There were some citations in the "What to expect" books that talked about it. Our pediatrician talked to us about it as well. Basically we just started with common, everyday things. Eat, mommy, daddy, shit like that. We have pretty much done away with it now but it was interesting at the time.

From what I have read about baby sign language, your kid probably won't be able to express their thoughts as sign language back to you under 9 months to a year of age, but you can start exposing them to the signs as early as 3 months, and they'll slowly start to understand them

Our 8 month old has understood the "milk" sign for a good month now. He gets SUPER excited when I make the sign, signaling it's time to go warm up his bottle, but he doesn't have near the coordination to actually make signs himself, he doesn't have the fine motor skills to move his fingers in any manner other than grabbing something yet.

They say to really focus on maybe 4-5 words top that you want them to be able to sign by a year or so old, stuff that could lead to frustration otherwise, things like "more" "stop/done" "eat" "drink" "milk" etc. You can't throw too many words at a kid that young or they'll be too confused to learn any of them.

We just started out by watching the Baby Einstein sign language on Youtube occasionally, mainly so mom and me could learn the signs, to then start using with him everytime it was applicable. Even though we know he can't respond yet, we always ask him "more?" or "done?" multiple times while eating, and emphasize that his bottle is "milk" everytime he sees it.

The sign language thing is not something I did, but I certainly have several friends who did, and their kids are well behind mine in language skills. Is that a scientific conclusion? Nope. I have no doubt whatsoever that the signing is good, and helps develop language skills. What we've done is speak a second language at home quite consistently. There's a constant thinking about what one word is in one language or another. That seems to have helped a lot with language skills, too.

French. We speak French at home and to each other.

Hipster.

Hipster would be if he only spoke Latin.

Despite anecdotal evidence , the knock against doing the sign language has always been that your kid won't start speaking as soon, but most studies refute that and in fact show that kids whose parents do sign language with them have a higher vocal vocabulary sooner than those who don't do it. Your kid is attempting to communicate with you well before they develop the ability to speak. Whether that is in the form of learning sign language or them throwing a fit until you pay attention to them is up to you as a parent.(I should mention here that I'm not criticizing those parents who don't go the signing route, there is more than one ways to skin a cat when it comes to responding to your child's attempts to communicate with you at that age).

As far as that anecdotal evidence, there are plenty of other factors (parental included) that influence a kids vocabulary and ability to speak outside of signing and on top of that, for no reason whatsoever your kid may be fast or slow at learning to speak and nothing you do as a parent will affect that and also it is no indictment at all on your kids development or intelligence if they don't start speaking as soon as possible.

Regarding the signing, there are a couple of schools of thought, first is you go the ASL route so your kid has a foundation that they can possibly use as a second language in the future (especially if you have deaf family members) or the hybrid route which incorporates some ASL but also some basic baby gestures that are easier for both the baby and parent to learn. Either way don't expect much and work on the very basics to start with. You baby isn't going to be having signing conversations with you but can learn to communicate some very basic needs.

In our experience kids that relied on sign language seemed to lag behind. Official studies say contrary. /shrug we haven't felt the need for using it and feel it delays language simply because your kid will get what they want without having to vocalize it. Similar to what happens with a sister or brother who speaks for or if you always anticipates their needs. If they don't have to talk some kids simply won't. Some will regardless. Everyone is different.

chaos_sl said:

Hipster.

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A pax on your house.

So it is.