A NewBorn’s Ability To Create A Dialogue

We know that crying is a vital part of communication between mother, father, or caregiver and baby. And being adorable is an important part of the dynamic. But what else is needed to keep parents involved in the round-the-clock, sleep-robbing, often frustrating task of keeping a newborn baby alive and safe?

“After six weeks, none of us would still be here if crying were the only thing to keep us attached to our mothers,” says Dr. Heidelise Als, director of Neurobehavioral Infant and Child Studies at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Evolution required that infants develop other features if they were going to entice their mothers to hang in there with them. Dr. Als began looking at those evolved baby tricks by studying mother-infant inter- actions. She got to know mothers well enough during their pregnancies that they invited her into the delivery room. She watched, listened, and took notes as they first laid eyes on their offspring. (“You look like Uncle Louie.” “You’re here, and you’re all mine.”) She came back the next day, and the next, and the next and kept watching, all the while asking herself the same question: What impact is the baby having on the mother?

As time passed, Dr. Als found something that she didn’t expect. There was a dialogue of facial expressions between mothers and newborns that immediately became a two-way street. From day one, the baby’s open eyes made mother happy and inspired her words. The baby’s yawn led to a winding down of the mother’s words. A sneeze would elicit words of comfort. A scrunched-up face would trigger a tender laugh.

Each baby, if you pay close attention, is keeping up his end of a conversation of signals, moods, and rhythms. He’s help- ing to steer adult response, even as individual responses are teaching him to call up new conversational signals. Babies have ways of keeping the people who love and pay attention to them involved, and they’ll begin the dialogue immediately with a birth mother, or with an adoptive parent or other committed caregiver, as soon as they get the chance. Those skills, refined through millions of years of evolution, prove to be enough to get the adults in their lives to put up with crying, sleeplessness, dirty diapers and a transformation of life that new parents can’t possibly have anticipated.