Children cognitively recognize cause and effect.

Sitting up, eye contact, crawling, and more.

For this reason, it is vital that the successes with teaching infants sign language be expanded throughout this century of human development. With astonishingly unbroken consistency, infants who are taught sign language as early as 6 to 9 months develop earlier verbalization skills with significant reduction of stress and frustration.

The largest part of an infant's frustration is the inability to communicate. Unfortunately, adults vastly underestimate the mind operation of children, especially those under the age of five. As a result, the adult limits the communication skills being practiced between parent and infant. The more frustrated a child is, the more natural it is for parent to become frustrated. Let's face it: we're not often thrilled to hear the wails of an infant who seemingly can't be comforted other than by our two primary responses to that wailing:

- holding and/or rocking the child

- feeding the child

It's worth the effort to determine precisely why the child is unhappy. We see case after case after case of success using this extraordinary shortcut to developing greater human beings, children who can and do communicate more effectively as a result of having more and better-developed skills.

In this generation, where we are absorbing information in amounts a hundred times greater than we did just two or three generations ago, our tools have that much more potential to serve us, quickly, and effectively. It is a state of mind and set of tools referred to as the Great Shortcuts Pathway.