Teach Yourself Your Baby's Development

Chapter 01 - Introduction

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Congratulations! You have become, or about to become, a parent. You are probably feeling excited, but also quite nervous – a new human being is entirely dependent on your for survival. How he grows and develops, the sort of person he becomes, all this might be down to you. And maybe that is why you have bought this book. You want to know, does your input really matter? Will your baby grow up to become an accountant, a rock star, a famous artist or a notorious criminal because of or in spite of what you do?

Or maybe that had not crossed your mind, and all you want to know is how to get off to the best start in this first year. What will your baby need, how should you respond to him, is it ok to leave him to cry? Or will picking him up each time he cries, teach him to be attention seeking?

Then on the other hand, perhaps you feel as I did when I first had a baby; where is the manual? What am I supposed to do? What on earth does it mean when he cries? If he smiles, is it just wind, or does he really know who I am? Is it ok if I go back to work early? Do I really have to play with him when he’s only a baby, or read him a book, or could I just put him in front of the TV and let that entertain him? After all he’s not going to remember any of this, is he?

Hopefully this book will answer all these questions, and do more besides. I hope it will give you confidence in your ability to parent this new human being, will tell you that what you feel like doing is actually the right thing to do, but will also explain why it is right.

A: Why you are important to your baby

In the course of this book you will discover that the most important things you can provide for a baby in his first year are love and interaction. Love will actually help your baby to grow, lack of love will stunt him, as you will see. Interaction of course springs from love; you will talk to and interact with your baby because you love him and because loving someone means wanting to be with them, relating to them. And as it happens the most stimulating thing you can do for your baby in this first year is to interact with him; this will help him learn, form connections in his brain, and it will also teach him how to speak and eventually communicate with the world into which he has been born. This book will show you why interaction is important, and more importantly how to interact with your baby in a positive and helpful way.

Throughout this book, you will see that although your baby is born very capable, he depends utterly on your involvement to grow and develop. You will discover that the most important gift he has is to be flexible – he can adapt to any language, any society. This flexibility has made human beings the dominant species on the planet, able to survive in any environment. Babies fit into this by being good at learning, excellent imitators and taking many years to mature. The only resources they need are adults around them who want to help them learn. 

In fact finding out how your baby develops will also tell you quite a lot about how the human race works and why we all behave as we do, which is why psychologists spend such a lot of time looking at babies, at least they have done recently, because throughout most of history, babies were simply been thought of as little adults; no one considered studying them for their own sake until the twentieth century when we realised that if we want to understand how human beings work, taking a look at how we get going in the first place might shed some light on the subject.

If we want to understand how people solve problems for instance, why not look at how babies tackle shape sorters? If we want to understand how language works, perhaps studying how babies learn to speak would be revealing. So for the last one hundred years or so, psychologists have devoted their lives to studying how babies develop, and in the course of their studies, have revealed much about human nature in general. Now  you as parents can benefit from this body of knowledge, finding out what your baby is doing at each stage in his life, and why.

A: Can you influence the way your baby turns out?

Some fairly fundamental questions have vexed psychologists, philosophers and others, which we often refer to as the nature versus nurture divide:

• Are babies pre-programmed to behave in a certain way, or do they learn from their parents and the society in which they live?
• Are human beings ruled by instincts that were created by the forces of evolution, or are such primitive drives irrelevant in the modern day world?
• As adults, are we at the mercy of unconscious impulses created by our early childhood experiences, or are we instead driven by equally unconscious, biologically pre-determined neural or chemical impulses?
• And most importantly, what effect does all this have on how we raise our children?

Traditionally psychologists were split into two camps; empiricists and nativists. Empiricists said that babies are born like “blank slates waiting to be written on”; that for a newborn baby, the world is a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” so that babies need to learn everything from scratch, whereas nativists believed that we are actually born with lots of innate capabilities, which means of course that babies have less to learn, instead they simply wait for things to unfold, their development all being genetically pre-determined.

In some ways you could say that empiricists are optimistic about human behaviour – if nothing is pre-ordained then with the right environment, every baby could potentially grow up to be Einstein, while nativists are more pessimistic; if everything is innate, then there is not much potential for change. And the question is very important; if we discover that every baby’s behaviour is governed by their genes, then there is no point in putting public money into helping underprivileged children: in fact we could probably just screen out undesirable children before they were born by reading off their genes like a supermarket barcode. Less dramatically, and of more relevance to you, it would also mean that you would not really have to do much to help your baby develop, as everything would just happen at the right stage as an automatic process.

If babies did develop according to a set of genetic instructions, then their early behaviour would be mostly instinctive. (See box below). The problem for psychologists is that it’s really difficult to work out what is instinctive and what has been learnt. While a behaviour that’s already present at birth might look as if it’s instinctive, in fact babies actually have nine months of learning before they are born – i.e. in utero. So for instance at birth your baby will respond to his mother’s voice, preferring it to other female voices, but this of course is because he has learned to recognise it; nothing to do with instinct.

C: Definition of instinctive behaviour

Even when behaviour is instinctive, it can change with experience. For instance newly hatched baby gulls immediately begin to peck at their parent’s bill to elicit food, so this is an instinct (they cannot have learnt that this behaviour will produce food) but over time the chicks get more accurate at pecking, so they are learning from experience. 

A similar thing happens with smiling; human babies all start to smile at around five weeks even if they are blind, so this must be an instinct (blind babies cannot be copying their parents) but as time goes on, babies who can see develop a wide repertoire of smiles, while blind children become less responsive and their facial expressions become more static with time. So smiling is an innate behaviour, but experience modifies this behaviour.

What we should conclude from these few examples and many more besides, is that neither empiricists nor nativists are right; instead there is an interaction between genetics and environment, so a particular behaviour could be instinctive; your baby is born to do it, but he will then change that behaviour with experience.

In fact we now know that this interaction between genes and environment starts happening from the minute the egg that will become your baby, is fertilised. The way he develops in the womb follows a very clear pattern, so there are strong genetic instructions at work here, but the environment of the womb can have a profound effect too, which is why pregnant women have to be so careful about their diets.

As an example, teratogens are environmental factors which create developmental abnormalities in the foetus leading to birth defects. One terrible such teratogen was the drug Thalidomide. Prescribed to mothers in the 1950s to combat morning sickness, unfortunately if it was taken during the first two months of pregnancy it resulted in babies being born with severe limb deformities. Drugs such as heroin, cocaine, alcohol and nicotine are all teratogens as they can all affect baby’s development in the womb, as can poor nutrition, infectious diseases such as rubella and chicken pox, and maternal stress.

What we shall see in this book is that babies are born with a wide range of innate abilities – genetic pre-programming if you like - but that they can also learn incredibly rapidly. In fact having these inborn capacities is precisely what allows them to learn so quickly from their environment, and throughout this book you will find out that there are ways to help your baby maximise his genetic potential by providing just the right environment for him at each stage.

We shall also see that your baby’s development is not only an interaction between genes and environment but also a moving between what psychologists call “specificity” and “plasticity”. Plasticity refers to the fact that there is a great deal of flexibility in development; so that even though your baby’s brain is born with some specific instructions to follow (specificity), it is through interacting with people, through participating in the culture and the physical world that his brain is actually constructed. Like a flat pack piece of furniture, our genes provide a starter kit and a basic “how to” manual to build a brain, but the world around us picks up where our genes cannot, causing the connections in the brain to form as your baby progresses from embryo to infancy and beyond.

A: How this book works

Having a new baby to look after means that time is the one thing you don’t have, so this book is organised in such a way that you don’t need to read it all, cover to cover, to find out what you need.

Section one is for parents who want to know what their baby is doing at each stage of development and why. It starts with an overview of how your baby gets moving and the stages he needs to go through in the first year. Then it breaks down into age groups; chapter three looks at what is happening for your baby in his first six weeks, when your baby is getting used to the world and coming to terms with the input from his senses, chapter four looks at six weeks to six months, when your baby is still relatively helpless, is struggling to control his body, but when he is now more alert and ready to interact with you, and chapter five takes you from six months to toddlerhood, basically from sitting to walking. Each of these three chapters will look at how the world appears from your baby’s point of view at that stage, and knowing this will help you respond appropriately. At each stage therefore you will find out how you can comfort your baby, how you should respond to his crying and why. You  will also discover how to interact with your baby in an age appropriate way, thus stimulating him and helping him onto the next stage of development.

Section two covers special situations like premature babies or twins and multiple births, so if you have a full term singleton baby you can skip this part.

Section three will then explain in more detail why love and interaction is important for your baby. It will look at how your baby’s brain grows and how this is affected by your input.  Part one looks at how your baby bonds with you and with other members of his family, as well as how these early relationships affect your baby’s sense of security, both now and as he grows up. We look too at the implications of this for childcare, and what the best sort of childcare might be if you have to leave your baby to return to work. We explore a bit more about your baby’s place in the family; how different family structures work for your baby, his relationship to siblings, and at the same time, we look at how your baby might affect your relationship with your partner, how to maintain that relationship, and the effect on your baby if the relationship breaks down. We also look into the future to make some suggestions about how your approach to parenting might change as your baby grows up.

Part two continues to look at how your baby’s brain grows and how it is affected by your input, but here the emphasis is on your baby learning about the world. So firstly we look at how your baby learns, how he organises his knowledge and why, and then we look at how he learns to communicate and eventually to speak. Finally we look at whether play matters for a baby, what play means and how to play with your baby, and whether boys and girls develop differently.

You should find that you can read the part of the book which interests you most at any time, and hopefully you will find it easy to read and understand, and above all that you can put it into practice with your baby. Enjoy!

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A: Summary of this chapter

• The most important things a baby needs in his first year are love and interaction.
• If you believe that everything is inborn and genetically determined, then it would not really matter what you did, your baby would turn out in a particular way because his genes directed him to do so.
• In fact it is very hard to separate out what is inborn, instinctual behaviour that all babies will do, and what is actually learnt.
• We now believe though, that your baby is a product of an interaction between his genes and the environment you provide, and that providing the right environment will allow him to fulfil his genetic potential.

A: What this means for you and your baby

It might seem incredibly daunting, that you are responsible for providing the right environment for your baby’s development. The good news is that your baby will guide you in what he needs, as you will see. He loves to learn, and will complain if he gets bored. Learning is as natural to him as feeding or breathing. In addition this book will show you that adults instinctively change their behaviour to provide exactly what a baby needs. So don’t get too concerned about what you need to do; your baby will develop normally if you give him your love and your time.