There seems to be an entire industry now trying to help parents communicate better with their babies. Here in Metro Manila, for example, we have at least one certified baby sign language instructor, and of course books and DVDs abound in stores.

Several weeks ago, a friend of mine who has a four-month-old daughter urged me to try to find a Dunstan Baby Language DVD. "It really works," he said. In fact, he was only able to find a DVD when his daughter was 2 months old, and he wished that he had watched it even before his baby was born.


A sampler from the DVD.

I've seen Dunstan Baby Language on Oprah, and from what I can tell, it makes a lot of sense. A newborn baby will instinctively make certain sounds expressing what he/she wants. A sound similar to sucking produces a "neh" sound, which signals hunger. The sound you make when you're trying to push a burp out of your system produces a short maragsa "eh" sound which signals the need to be burped. And so on.

Priscilla Dunstan's credentials are pretty impressive as well. She has a "photographic aural memory": when she was a child she could listen to a Mozart piece once and play it on her violin exactly as she heard it, not missing a single note. She later went on to study music and became an opera singer. When she gave birth to a very colicky baby, she began to record her son's different cries and developed a categorization system which became the Dunstan Baby Language. According to the Dunstan website, 9 out of 10 mothers who've tried it say that it has worked for them.

So at the very least, this Dunstan Baby Language is worth a try. :) You can get the DVD second-hand for around US$25 in the United States. (It's a pricey $40 brand new, but then again, if the system works, this woman should be compensated for her discovery.) I'm not sure where in the Philippines it's available, though.