Why shared moments and enjoyable back and forth communication with your baby matters

Make time to notice when your baby initiates communication with you

Good communication goes two ways, even with babies. Can you make space during the day for opportunities to notice and respond when your baby initiates communications or expressions?

Parents are often delighted to notice their tiny newborn's little mouth trying to make a sound, little eyes gazing into theirs, hands and arms and legs moving slightly as if to reach out. As your baby grows, communications become more vigorous and more complicated - an endless source of wonder, if we can make the time in the midst of the busy-ness of tending the baby's physical needs to simply wait upon these communications, and enjoy them when they come!

Your baby's desire to be close to you and her emotions as she interacts with you shape and drive her developing physical movements, such as reaching out.

Your baby needs you to notice her attempts to start communication with you, and then to experience your physical response or your sounds or affection in response. This makes her feel it's worthwhile trying again next time.

We don't need to notice every time our baby initiates communication, but enough times. This is how we create back and forth, or to and fro communications with our baby as the days pass by. Back and forth communication is driven by the powerful desire for enjoyment between loving adults or older siblings, and babies.

With young babies, back and forth communication is highly physical. Your body interacts with your baby’s body. The sounds we make are often playful, or musical, without a focus on words. Making a sound or a word is, of course, motor movement before all else. You might repetitively open up your baby’s arms for instance, and then make funny little sounds and facial expressions as you clap your baby’s hands together. Your baby smiles at you and waits for you to do it again. When you do it again, this is – to your baby – quite hilarious. Your baby’s chuckle makes you laugh, and your baby laughs in anticipation of the movement again, and laughs even more each time you do it.

As your baby develops, more sounds and words will pass between you. Many cultures emphasise the physicality of interaction with a baby much more than in Western societies, which have a highly verbal emphasis. It can be helpful to remember to make lots of time for enjoying the physicality of interaction (lifting and moving baby in games, or playing together on the floor in physical ways) even as you use more and more words to interact with your baby as he grows. Motor development builds the foundations for speech development.

Generally by about four months of age, your baby will be initiating communication more often than you! This is a good thing. If this isn't the case, you might experiment with making space more regularly throughout the day to watch, enjoy, and catch your baby initiating communication, so that you can respond. You can find out more about the little one who doesn't cue a lot here.

A relaxed and casual pattern of noticing and responding tends to go best

After about six months of age or so, you might find you listen to your baby's sounds while she makes physical expressions, and then respond to her sounds by eye-contacting and warmly repeating back to baby what you think she is trying to say. It seems to me that this is just about enjoying your baby. It's what parents do without having to think about it - unless high levels of stress or painful emotions are getting in the way.

Actually, if I talk to you too much about helping your baby's speech development, I might accidentally make you might feel this is something else you have to do according to the rules, for your baby to develop and be able to speak at all! That isn't the case.

Often as health professionals we accidentally give parents the idea that they have to make their baby develop. Yet across highly diverse and imperfect human environments, across many different cultures and approaches to baby care, babies have flourished and thrived for millenia. I don't want to make you feel you have to try even harder to be a good mother or parent! Feeling worried about having to respond to your baby's every little communication is not good for your baby or good for you.

Really, it's just about relaxing and enjoying your baby when moments open up together (and not paying much too much attention to your baby at other times, which is normal as you get busy together in your day outside the home). Enjoyment, and being sure to make time every now and then to specially notice and delight in your baby throughout the days and nights - that's what counts.

Selected references

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Centre on the Developing Child, Harvard University. A guide to serve and return: how your interaction with children can build brains. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/guide/a-guide-to-serve-and-return-how-your-interaction-with-children-can-build-brains/

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