You talking to me?

Cuddling your infant, rocking, reading and talking to them is an essential bonding experience that helps develop and integrate all of the senses. Your baby won’t start saying words for several months and sentences for a year or more but he or she is communicating with you. Babies communicate from birth, through sounds (crying, cooing, squealing), facial expressions (eye contact, smiling, grimacing) and gestures/body movements (moving legs in excitement or distress, and later, gestures like pointing.) Respond to reassure them and to reinforce their behavior.

Making Senses

Sensory development begins during gestation and continues throughout childhood. At birth, the average baby’s brain is about a quarter of the size of the average adult brain. Incredibly, it doubles in size in the first year. It keeps growing to about 80% by age 3 and 90% — nearly full grown — by age 5.” (“Brain Development,” First Things First) There are about 1 million neurons in the brain at birth; that doesn’t change over time. What does change is the size of the brain and number of neural connections — about a million a second in infants. (“Brain Architecture,” Harvard Center for the Developing Child, 2017)

The senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing and vision are in various states of development at birth and mature at a phenomenal rate for the next 4 to 18 months. Newborns can typically distinguish between hot and cold and can feel pain; smell is acute at birth. Vision and hearing improve significantly over the first year. Sensing movement/balance (vestibular) and sense of body position in relation to its environment (propioception) improve the most after birth in response to movement. These senses allow the baby to sit up, stand, crawl and walk when integrated with the other senses. (AbilityPath, “How Your Child’s Sensory System Develops”)

The Importance of Reading and Talking

On average, a child who has been read to from birth will be exposed to about 30 million more words in their first three years than a child that hasn’t yet been read to. MIT cognitive scientists have now found that conversation between an adult and a child appears to change the child’s brain, and that back and forth conversation is actually more critical to language development than the word gap. (MIT News Office, February 2018) There is also strong evidence that children that have been read to are better prepared for reading and school. The bottom line — “The early years are the best opportunity for a child’s brain to develop the connections they need to be healthy, capable, successful adults. The connections for many important, higher-level abilities like motivation, self-regulation (for example, the ability to self-calm), problem-solving and communication are formed in these early years — or not at all. It’s much harder for these essential brain connections to be formed later in life.” (First Things First, “Brain Development)

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) research by the Cincinnati Children’s Clinic and others since 2017 shows remarkable stimulation at the center of the brain where language and the other senses develop. The greatest brain activity occurs when someone they know speaks to them and shows them images. Speaking to them only causes some brain activity. Watching a video with the same speaker and images shows very little brain activity. (The Enchanted Hour, 2018)

Development Milestones

At each major developmental milestone, BabyRead® provides handouts to parents/caregivers from the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) ActEarly website (www.cdc.org/ActEarly) and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ HealthyChildren website (www.healthychildren.org). These include physical, social and cognitive skills and sensory milestones; developmental delay indicators; and things you can do for your child’s particular age group. Reading and talking are mentioned frequently. These and other websites are a great source of helpful articles on a variety of subjects. See Helpful Links for more information.