Religion is not a friendly topic — Nanay

I better write this before I get snowed under again. The company that showed the bride kidnapping in Krygyztan, has this segment called Cutting Edge. I manage to catch it’s latest offering called Baby Bible Bashers. If you thought, abducting women and forcing them to marry strangers is a disturbing TV moment, watching a toddler evangelise in front of an abortion clinic is just painful.

The show presented three kids: Samuel, 7, from Mississippi, Terry, 9, from Florida, and Ana from Brazil who started preaching at the age of 3.

All three kids had a common denominator, zealots for parents. Bringing up God-fearing children is something most Christian parents wish to be. But in this case, these parents went and sowed fear in the hearts of their children. These kids carry guilts the size of the world and they are tasked with impossible responsibilities. And all the parents seemed convinced that their kids are the ones who started it all. It’s a common theme, the kid “want to do it”. They feign surprise at how their kids apparent fervour.

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Ever heard of Makaton Signing? I’m sure teacher Julie is familiar with it. We all know what sign-language is. Well Makaton is a simplified version. It uses a combination of pictures or symbols and signs from modified Sign Language to express what you want, but like with Sign Language the user is encouraged to mouth the words as they sign. The goal being speech will develop and then the pictures go, until finally the signing is dropped.

I first learnt about Makaton Signing from a newscast. A number of private organisations were offering Makaton Signing for babies and toddlers. In one segment, they showed an 8-month old baby girl “asking” for her hat. They read her a book and she was signing the words for the pictures she saw, like ducks and dogs. It was really amazing. Imagine as parents to babies we don’t really know what they want or feel, but with signs they can “tell” us. I didn’t give it much thought because I’m sure it will be expensive & besides, we talk to our son a lot. That was in 2005.

2006 and my son turned 2 but his speech was very delayed. He was diagnosed with glue ear, which I’ve already blogged about here. One of the speech therapist’s recommendations was the use of Makaton Signing. I couldn’t attend any of the classes and my husband, unfortunately, wasn’t able to keep up either. Thankfully my son’s nursery staff were already being trained on it.

Kelvin’s speech has improved greatly since then due to a combination of events. It’s just really nice to have this Makaton Signing as backup. Whenever he’s trying to tell us something or he wants to make a point, he’d often sign to us. And because the purpose of Makaton is to make signing simple & easy to understand, the signs are actually what you’d normally expect for the words the person is “looking” for.

When Kelvin attended a group session in a speech evaluation class, the facilitators were really happy to see him signing. He didn’t need any encouragement, it was second nature.

As staple of his telly-time, I always schedule BBC’s Something Special, so he can learn even more. This show is brilliant. It’s aimed at kids with learning disabilities or infirmities, but toddlers will really enjoy the colours, the pace and activities being shown. Unfortunately sometime back, their main character, Mr Tumble, got in trouble. One time he was supposedly signing for “i’m happy to see you”, apparently he was actually signing “i’m effing you”.

I thought I’d share this with fellow mums. Makaton Signing is easy to learn. Their website offers a lot of handy materials to get you started. Imagine being able to “talk” to your little angels even before they turned 1, that’s really something special.

Hey, this is not a paid post. :-)