infant learning

What is your infant learning?
Newborns regularly occupy a state of alert inactivity—they are quiet and alert and will focus on your face or voice.

In the first few weeks of life, babies recognize and prefer familiar faces. If a parent and a stranger talk to a newborn, the baby will turn his or her face toward the parent, not the stranger.
Infants know the smell of their mother’s milk. One researcher placed three-day-old infants on their backs and placed breast pads from their mothers and from other nursing women on either side of their heads. The infants turned toward the smell of their own mothers. Smell is one of the first connections newborns make with their mothers. Within seconds of the time that a newborn smells his or her mother, indelible networks of attachment and recognition are formed in the brain.

Two-day-old infants may imitate an adult who smiles, frowns or shows surprise. Babies have an innate capacity to imitate and do what people around them are doing.

Babies as young as six weeks have learned to respond differently to their mothers and fathers. When the mother approaches, babies tend to relax their bodies, their heart and respiration rate soften. When the father approaches, the babies’ heart and respiration rate go up, their eyes open wide, as if to say: "It’s party time...this is Dad!" In general, mothers’ interactions are calming, while fathers’ are more playful and the babies’ reactions reflect these differences.

Through the experience of being cared for, your baby is beginning to learn how to regulate his emotional state and calm down. Areas of the brain that regulate bodily functions like heart rate, temperature and sleep are developing in these early months. When you hold your crying baby and calm him by talking or rocking, your baby is learning that intense distress can decrease. At first your baby relies on you, and then develops ways to calm himself over time.