Excerpts from the Psychology Today article Raising Baby: What You Need to Know by Joanna Lipari
The key to stimulating emotional and intellectual growth in your child is your own behavior—Parental behavior what you do, what you don’t do, how you scold, how you reward and how you show affection.
[The article compares] researchers’ “old thinking” and “new thinking.” They highlight the four new insights changing the way we view infant development. The sections on “What To Do” then explain how to apply that new information.
1. FEELINGS TRUMP THOUGHTS
It is the emotional quality of the relationship you have with your baby that will stimulate his or her brain for optimum emotional and intellectual growth.
In this country, far too much emphasis is placed on developing babies’ cognitive abilities.
Flying in the face of all those “smarter” baby books are studies suggesting that pushing baby to learn words, numbers, colors and shapes too early forces the child to use lower-level thinking processes, rather than develop his or her learning ability.
Tufts University child psychologist David Elkind makes it clear that putting pressure on a child to learn information sends the message that he or she needs to “perform” to gain the parents’ acceptance, and it can dampen natural curiosity.
Instead, focus on building baby’s emotional skills. “Emotional development is not just the foundation for important capacities such as intimacy and trust,” says Stanley Greenspan, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School and author of the new comprehensive book Building Healthy Minds. “It is also the foundation of intelligence and a wide variety of cognitive skills. At each stage of development, emotions lead the way, and learning facts and skills follow. Even math skills, which appear to be strictly an impersonal cognition, are initially learned through the emotions: ‘A lot’ to a 2-year-old, for example, is more than he would expect, whereas ‘a little’ is less than he wants.”
2. BIRTH TO TWO MONTHS
In his revolutionary book, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, psychiatrist Daniel Stem challenged the conventional wisdom on infant development by proposing that babies come into this world as social beings. In research experiments, newborns consistently demonstrate that they actively seek sensory stimulation, have distinct preferences and, from birth, tend to form hypotheses about what is occurring in the world around them. Their preferences are emotional ones. In fact, parents would be unable to establish the physiological cycles like wake-sleep without the aid of such sensory, emotional activities as rocking, touching, soothing, talking and singing. In turn, these interactions stimulate the child’s brain to make the neuronal connections she needs in order to process the sensory information provided.
3. THE LOVE LOOP: BEGINNING AT TWO MONTHS.
At approximately eight weeks, a miraculous thing occurs–your baby’s vision improves and for the first time, she can fully see you and can make direct eye contact. These beginning visual experiences of your baby play an important role in social and emotional development. “In particular, the mother’s emotionally expressive face is, by far, the most potent visual stimulus in the infant’s environment,” points out UCLA’s Alan Schore, “and the child’s intense interest in her face, especially in her eyes, leads him/her to track it in space to engage in periods of intense mutual gaze.” The result: Endorphin levels rise in the baby’s brain, causing pleasurable feelings of joy and excitement. But the key is for this joy to be interactive.
The loving gaze of parents to child is reciprocated by the baby with a loving gaze back to the parents, causing their endorphin levels to rise, thus completing a closed emotional circuit, a sort of “love loop.” Now, mother (or father) and baby are truly in a dynamic, interactive system. “In essence, we are talking less about what the mother is doing to the baby and more about how the mother is being with the baby and how the baby is learning to be with the mother,” says Schore.
The final aspect of this developing interactive system between mother and child is the mother’s development of an “emotional synchronization” with her child. Schore defines this as the mother’s ability to tune into the baby’s internal states and respond accordingly. For example: Your baby is quietly lying on the floor, happy to take in the sights and sounds of the environment. As you notice the baby looking for stimulation, you respond with a game of “peek-a-boo.” As you play with your child and she responds with shrieks of glee, you escalate the emotion with bigger and bigger gestures and facial expressions. Shortly thereafter, you notice the baby turns away. The input has reached its maximum and you sense your child needs you to back off for awhile as she goes back to a state of calm and restful inactivity. “The synchronization between the two is more than between their behavior and thoughts; the synchronization is on a biological level–their brains and nervous systems are linked together,” points out Schore. “In this process, the mother is teaching and learning at the same time. As a result of this moment-by-moment matching of emotion, both partners increase their emotional connection to one another. In addition, the more the mother fine-tunes her activity level to the infant during periods of play and interaction, the more she allows the baby to disengage and recover quietly during periods of nonplay, before initiating actively arousing play again.”
In this way, you, the parents, are the safety net under your baby’s emotional highwire; the act of calming her down, or giving her the opportunity to calm down, will help her learn to handle ever-increasing intensity of stimulation and thus build emotional tolerance and resilience.
4. THE SHAME TRANSACTION
Toward the end of the first year, as crawling turns to walking, a shift occurs in the communication between child and parents. “Observational studies show that 12-month-olds receive more positive responses from mothers, while 18-month-olds receive more instructions and directions,” says Schore. In one study, mothers of toddlers expressed a prohibition–basically telling the child “no”–approximately every nine minutes! That’s likely because a mobile toddler has an uncanny knack for finding the most dangerous things to explore!
In essence, it’s not the experience of shame that can be damaging, but rather the inability of the parent to help the child recover from that shame.
Embarrassment (a component of shame) first emerges around 14 months, when mom’s “no” results in the child lowering his head and looking down in obvious sadness. The child goes from excited (my daughter scribbling on the wall) to sudden deflation (my “NO!”) back to excitement (“It’s okay, let’s wash the wall together”). During this rapid process, various parts of the brain get quite a workout and experience heightened connectivity, which strengthens these systems. The result is development of the orbitofrontal cortex (cognitive area) and limbic system (emotional area) and the ability for the two systems to interrelate emotional resiliency in the child and the ability to self-regulate emotions and impulse control.
What is important to remember about productive shame reactions is that there must be a quick recovery. Extended periods of shame result in a child learning to shut down, or worse, become hyperirritable, perhaps even violent. It’s common sense: Just think how you feel when someone embarrasses you. If that embarrassment goes on without relief, don’t you tend to either flee the situation or mil against it?
Read the full article for more tips on what to do to utilize these findings.
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One of the biggest concern of every parent is their child’s development. And for that reason we must have to know the things needed for them. But before anything else, we must have to consider our own behavior especially when dealing to them. This will be a great impact on how to nurture you child. Thanks for the informative post, I love them!
thanks for this post.Help a lot.Wish all the best
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