Two-year-old Kyla has found a way to get understood.

She learnt signing in a programme for hearing babies, which claims to help curb temper tantrums from frustrated children when their parents just don't get it.

"Sometimes when she eats and she forgets to tell me thank you, but there's food in her mouth so she sign languages me," said Jojo Lim, parent of Kyla.

"I am a physical therapist and I understand that motoric development happens earlier than when children are linguistically prepared to have a vocabulary and to communicate," said Sandy Kobylarz, a parent who uses sign language.

"It's now so much easier to understand what they want, and that definitely limits the crying so it's extremely helpful for me," said parent Any Swan.

The programme was made popular in the US by child development expert Dr Joseph Garcia.

Speaking via satellite video conference from Washington, Dr Garcia says he believes teaching infants to sign will draw long-term benefits as the child gets more engaged and becomes an active problem-solver in the future.

The Children Hub is the first playschool to introduce the programme in Singapore after seeing positive results from its trial run.

"Before we brought it into Singapore, we tested it out on our children in our playschool and the results were really encouraging. Within three months, a child who doesn't know how to say a single word was encouraged by signing and to speak. And now she is confident to speak without signing," said Christine Chee, programme manager of The Children Hub.

By Nur Azira Aziz
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/199885/1/.html