Parent Tip Sheets

Language, Literacy and Social-Emotional Development

By Terri Patterson, H&V Headquarters

The H&V FL3 Language and Literacy Advisory Board (see sidebar) is so excited about these new parent tip sheets created for parents and caretakers of children who are deaf or hard of hearing. The eight tip sheets briefly describe the developmental process of infants and toddlers with hearing differences in cognitive, social, emotional, language (semantics, syntax-morphology, pragmatics, phonology –auditory and visual), pre-literacy and literacy development. These handouts, named the ‘Parent Take-aways’, also include suggestions for parents and caretakers for fun, everyday activities to enhance development in these important growth areas. Parents, hang these up on your refrigerator and pick an activity or two to include in your baby’s daily routine or when you are out and about exploring the world.

For example, to support the social-emotional health of your baby, here are a few tips:

• Engage in turn-taking games, such as pat-a-cake, peek-a-boo, tickle games, and making faces at one another.
• Build predictable routines.
• Respond to emotional states with understanding and calmness. Recognize your role in your child’s well-being.
• Use language to describe your feelings and those of your child. Build a strong vocabulary of words/signs for emotions.

Why are these activities so important? A baby’s strong emotional development lays the foundation for his or her relationships with others. These early skills include:how your baby understands and expresses emotions; how your baby grows to think about him or herself; and how your baby learns to regulate emotions and interact with you and others in his or her environment.

This parent-friendly, colorful tip sheet along with seven others featuring different aspects of your child’s healthy development in the specific areas below, including how to support early literacy in your baby to assist in reading as they grow, and tips to support visual language access and more is located on our website in the FL3 section. Save them on your phone, print them up, send them to the grandparents or to childcare with your child!

• Cognitive Development
• Early Literacy Development
• Language Development
• Semantics
• Syntax and Morphology
• Phonology
• Child Pragmatics
• Visual Language Development
• Social Emotional Development

See Parent Take-aways on the Hands & Voices website, https://www.handsandvoices.org/fl3/fl3-docs/parent-take-aways.html  or take a deeper dive into the H&V FL3 Project in these areas here, https://www.handsandvoices.org/fl3/topics/lang-lit-soc.html .   ~

Editor’s note: Patterson is the Director of Chapter Support and the H&V FL3 Liaison to Family Based Organizations

H&V Communicator – Summer 2019