It's hard to tell your mom what you want when you're 15 months old and not able to talk yet.
But thanks to a new baby sign language program at a local day-care centre -- and a fund created to honour the retirement of a Canadian banking executive -- infants and toddlers are using hand signs to show what they want.
"She just started the signs two weeks ago," Charlette Sinclair said of her daughter, Shasta, on Friday.
"Now every time she puts her fingers to her mouth, she wants to eat. She does it so much now it seems I always have to cook for her."
Carolyn Young, executive director of the Manidoo Gi Miini Gonaan-R.B. Russell Infant Centre, one of four recipients of donations from the Coffey Fund, said they begin teaching signs to very young children.
"A lot of our children don't speak until they're two, but with baby sign language, we can communicate with them when they are eight months old," she said.
Young said they use 20 signs, including ones that allow a baby to signal eat, more, help, bedtime, milk and juice.
"If they didn't have the baby sign, it would be difficult to figure out what they want," she said. Young said the donation from the Coffey Fund will allow the organization to prepare baby sign kits for parents as well as purchase the technical equipment to show parents at other child-care centres how to do the technique.
Former Royal Bank of Canada executive Charlie Coffey said the program at the infant centre, where the children of young mothers who are working to earn their high school certificates are cared for -- is exactly what he was hoping the fund created three years ago would do.
"This is a very significant grassroots organization," Coffey said.
"They're looking after our most precious resources -- our children."
Coffey said the endowment fund was created by the RBC and his colleagues when he retired three years ago after a 44-year career with the bank, during which time he led business banking for five years and headed regional headquarters in Winnipeg, Ontario, and Metro Toronto. He has also served as chairman of the Council for Early Child Development and chairman of the national advisory council for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
Coffey was appointed an officer in the Order of Canada in 2004.
"The intent is to grow the fund, and in the end it's the children in Winnipeg who will benefit," said Coffey. "If we don't get it right in the early years, the cost to society is large in the later years."
kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
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