An interesting parenting article I ran across recently suggests that pointing a lot actually helps babies and toddlers learn to talk faster. The idea is that communicating at all requires a learned skill and that pointing is a form of communicating. Thus, the baby that learns to point is learning to communicate and since that is step one to learning how to talk, pointing is good.
This flies in the face of some, mostly unsupported, claims that responding to your baby or toddler when he points slows down their development and makes them take longer to learn to talk.
I’ve always said that the sooner you can communicate with your child, the better. I don’t care how you do it. Once you can communicate with each other, THEN you can worry about how things develop. While early childhood is a critical phase for development, the window for learning skills and emotions is not just weeks wide. That critical early time lasts months in most cases, and as long as years in other cases.
So, talk to your child and let them talk to you, any way they can. I think that has to be some of the best parenting advice for dads and moms.