Birth to Three Months

Preview
The Just Born
The Early Weeks
One Month
Two Months
Three Months
Developmental Hints and Alerts: Birth to Three Months
Sharpening Our Focus
Neurons, Neurons, and More ...
Memory
Emotion Development

* PREVIEW

It would be nifty if newborns greeted their parents with a broad smile that said, "Hey thanks for bringing me here!" But that's not going to happen. Indeed, newborns are relatively unsociable, which may surprise you. Yet rewards are coming. There are times when your very young baby will look at you briefly with rapt attention, reach out with his arms to touch a part of your body, or even make a few sounds to you. Many of these behaviors reflect behavioral biases that predispose newborns to respond to human faces and smiles, bobbing heads, and human voices. What matters most is that you and your baby can begin to build a relationship from day one! Your baby's response is most likely to occur when she's rested and in just the right state of alertness. If you can't get your newborn to respond, don't worry.

Very young babies are largely unsocial for good reason. Most of their energies must be directed toward adapting to a new environment, the one outside the womb. They must learn to breathe regularly and effectively, to nurse without regurgitating, to stay awake and alert for brief periods, and to have restful sleep periods. These adaptations are called physiological regulation, and collectively they are the most important challenges facing young babies. Be patient and provide lots of assistance when your baby needs an extra burp to eliminate gas or additional soothing to fall asleep. You're helping the baby with physiological regulation.

You'll soon be rewarded with the faint but very real social smile of your five- or six-week-old, the rapt attention of your two-month-old as she explores your face and makes eye contact with you, and the broad, consistent smile of your three- month-old as he welcomes your presence with coos and more smiles. The day-to- day interactions you have with your baby contribute to the transition from biologic predispositions to voluntary behaviors.

Once babies' vital systems are working smoothly, they have more total energy, which can be freed for other enterprises. As sleeping and eating become routine, the baby gains increasing control of her motor movements: when held upright her head control is stronger and less precarious than before. As other physical abilities improve — head control, reach, and grasp — babies increasingly explore their surroundings. As they explore, they learn about their environment.

Social interactions provide the baby with more learning opportunities. She learns that the scent of a familiar person and being picked up seem to happen together, that touching one hand with the other feels good, and that she can produce gruntinglike sounds. By three months, the tissues in her larynx are flexible enough to make vowel sounds. As soon as she emits these cooing sounds, at first accidentally, she sets about learning how to reproduce them. Grown-ups love to hear coos, and babies thrive on the attention that coos elicit!

Overall in just three short months, the baby's vital systems begin to function quite smoothly, her senses are maturing, and the baby can make some controlled head, arm, and hand movements. She has some vocal mechanisms that will eventually lead to speech, she has formed a few associations for events that co- occur, and she has learned that some things make her feel good. Instead of fretful, intermittent sleeping she has acquired the habit of a lengthy nighttime sleep and longer daytime periods of wakefulness. Not bad for only three months work!

The Just Born

* all senses are intact and working

* can move head from side to side

* has curled-up body position (fetal posture)

* SNAPSHOT

Birth launches the newborn into a totally new world. The baby has to make accommodations simply to survive, much less flourish, outside the womb. Suddenly he has to breathe on his own, swallow food to get nourishment, lie on a solid surface rather than float in a fluid space, and regulate his own body temperature. A newborn's physiological disorientation is akin to what we would experience if we were suddenly propelled to outer space.

When the umbilical cord is cut, the newborn begins his solo flight. The baby has to keep his plane aloft even though not all of his vital processes were checked out before liftoff and even though he has not been schooled about what to do if something malfunctions. Fortunately, biological predispositions help babies sustain life as they begin their adaptation to a world filled with people and objects and events.

The newborn's survival kit includes reflexes, movements, and the senses. A reflex is a patterned series of movements that occur in response to a particular stimulus; an adult example is the knee-jerk response, and a baby example is the grasp reflex. Reflexes perform many functions for babies. The sucking reflex provides him with a way to take in food now that nourishment is no longer automatically supplied through the umbilical cord. The grasp reflex allows him to hold on to a parent, which can build emotional closeness. Coughing and sneezing keep passages clear for ingestion and respiration.

Beyond reflexes, there are several kinds of movements in the newborn. Some spontaneous movements are total-body actions that are sometimes jerky or writhing and may be accompanied by leg kicks. These movements are due to an immature brain and its connections to an immature neuromuscular system. Spontaneous movements may look as if they are purposeful, such as when the baby stretches, but probably are due to some unobserved internal or external stimulus. Overall though, the spontaneous whole-body movements, whatever their cause, keep muscles toned during the time that a baby has limited means to exercise his trunk muscles and his limbs.

Other newborn movements consist of relatively controlled arm actions. Some of these are survival mechanisms, which are often set in motion by stimuli linked to primitive brain centers. The hand-to-mouth movement is an example: this basic movement allows a newborn to soothe himself by sucking on a hand or thumb under mild conditions of distress. Another kind of newborn controlled movement is easiest to observe under precise laboratory conditions and often consists of brief, limited range, up-and-down arm movements as if the baby was getting ready to wave.

The third component of the newborn's survival kit also includes the senses of touch, smell, vision, hearing, and taste, which provide information about surroundings. The baby's sense of touch, smell, and taste are functional, but additional experiences improve the ability to detect subtle variations within these inputs.

In terms of hearing,...