Our Baby News

What the Milestones Mean: Smiling

A newborn baby can follow you with her eyes, and she may smile if you smile at her.

This is the earliest form of socialization. It means she knows your face and is, for a moment, content.

If s also her first effort to bond; smiling is the simplest expression of love.

Is a smile a smile in the first week or two? A pooh-poohing grandmother will tell you if s just gas, until she gets her first little spontaneous smile.

In truth, though, most of the time a newborn’s first few, fleeting smiles are a reflex: from snuggling or from peeing or having a bowel movement (or yes, gas).

What the Milestones Mean: Early  Language Skill

Talk to your baby, sing songs, laugh, and smile with her. Remember, her receptive language skills are far more advanced than her expressive skills.

She can hear your voice, and very quickly learns to associate your voice with your face. Her first attempts at communication include crying and calming down, and when she hits about six or eight weeks, she will start cooing and “aah-ah-ing” at you.

Vowel sounds are easier to make than consonants.

You have a big responsibility to expose her to language as much as possible. Don’t talk into a phone when you’re spending time with her. She can’t understand your adult pitch and speed of normal speech.

Her hearing is more attuned to higher registers and softer voices. Investing time in baby talk yields bigger rewards than any mutual fund, and faster, too. Don’t wait until she’s six or eight months to start; you will have missed the boat.

Developmental Milestones

One way to really get to know your baby is to learn about the milestones he will cross. You should learn about the broad themes of development and have a good reference for each month or two of the first 18 to 24 months.

Doctors divide accomplishments into four varieties:

• Language: the two main components of language are expressive (what he says) and receptive (what he understands) skills. Receptive skills are far more advanced than expressive skills.

For example, he will generally be able to understand one-step commands (Put that away! Come to Mama! Bring Daddy the remote!) long before he will be able to say them.

• Socialization skills: the stepwise development of awareness of his self and his body and then the existence of other people: mommy, daddy, and strangers.

What the Milestones Mean: Early Motor Skills

Your baby’s movements in the first few weeks of life are governed more by hard wiring than voluntary choice. In his resting state his back, arms, and legs are flexed.

If you move him suddenly, he may reflexively curl up on one side and stretch the other side (the Moro reflex). If you stroke his cheek he will turn his head and open his mouth to look for a breast or bottle to suck on (the Rooting reflex).

These built in “primitive” reflexes are a sort of survival mechanism: to let him feed more efficiently, to conserve heat, and to hold on if he falls. With time, usually two months.

So, his maturing brain and muscles override these early signals with more sophisticated instructions, such as “Look at that! Aren’t that the breast that always makes tummy feel full? Lets go there!”

Stranger anxiety develops at about seven or eight months.

Get ready for some fearful clinging and anxious looks at people he already knows and used to smile at (like Grandma).

Why? The pleasures of crawling away from Mom are suddenly balanced with the terror of being away from Mom.

On a more social level, your baby knows, by now, that Mom is the Answer: for food, warmth, protection, you name it.

If Mom hands him off to someone else, he can’t be sure where his next meal is coming from.

A five-month-old doesn’t have either of these problems: He’s not mobile, and socially, he doesn’t care who you are as long as you smile at him.

Motor Development: 10-12 Month

The cruising, mobile pre-toddler is just on the verge of walking independently. He waves bye-bye and picks up small objects neatly.

As you anxiously await the moment of his first steps (camcorder constantly at the ready), you’ll see him standing independently more and more often and for longer periods.

Then he’ll try a step and plop forward. Sometimes, all they need at that stage is an object to stabilize themselves.

Put a large ball in his hands as he gets ready to try it again. The shift in his center of gravity may be enough to keep him from falling down.

And once he’s taken his first baby step, the rest come easily.

At this age, the range of variation from baby to baby is enormous. The rate at which one baby acquires new skills is necessarily different than the rate at which his best friend is picking up milestones.

Milestone Pauses

This bugs parents no end: Little Dylan masters a skill one day, pulling himself into a stand, for instance, and then he won’t do it again for days or weeks!

This is known as a pause. Perhaps a toy he really wanted to get to was somewhere high on a shelf above, which got him off his fanny in the first place.

He may need that motivation again before he bothers moving his tush.

Or, perhaps, he has developed another skill, say banging blocks together— which is, after all, far more satisfying from a bang-bang standpoint and can be done while sitting—that takes his time and energy and comes first.

What turns an achievement into a skill? How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. Not all babies want to practice something they’ve just achieved.

Motor Development: First Skills

As baby grows, the head grows, and the size  of the brain grows because it is continually expanding the interconnections between these nerve cells. These links are the conscious and unconscious signals that make up our mind.

At the time of birth, a vast network already exists. It is expanded with each muscular task. When he first learns to put his thumb in his mouth, his brain establishes a link between two neurons that is reused each time he does it—and thus he learns to satisfy himself. These pathways become the “memory” of movements: They go from an accident to a skill.

Some early motor skills include propping himself upright on his elbows, bringing his hands together, keeping his head up when he’s propped to sit, visually tracking an object from side to side.

Development and Back-to-Sleep Babies

Changing the way babies sleep has subtly changed the timing of motor milestone acquisition. A number of milestones once set in stone, or, rather, the Denver Developmental Screening Test, the standard by which infants have been measured since at least the 1970s (and whose last major modification, in 1992, was aimed primarily at language skills) were devised in another era, when babies slept on their stomachs.

The major early benchmarks, rolling over, crawling, and pulling up, all seem to occur later in infants who sleep on their back. The “delay” in these achievements turns out to be merely temporary. Large-scale studies have found that by a year of age, all babies are back on the same old track: They all seem to be walking and performing at the same pace as these “historic” standards.

Those researchers who carried out these surveys recommend keeping babies on their stomach while awake in order to develop the muscles (forearm, upper arm, and trunk) that aren’t used while asleep.

Social Development: 5-7 Months

Object permanence is a developmental milestone that’s not as obvious as turning over or saying her first few syllables: If s the understanding that an object exists even if she can’t see it. A ball that rolls away is now something she is interested in, so she will follow it.

If she pushes a stuffed doll out of reach, she reaches for it and may try to crawl or roll toward it. And it serves as the basis for the best game of all, peek-a-boo!

A newborn baby is, frankly a dud when it comes to playing peek-a-boo. They just don’t care if your face is there one minute and gone the next. But a six-month-old will giggle and frantically excitedly kick when you come back into view.

An important precaution: Depth perception lags behind the sense of permanence. That is, she may go over the edge of a bed without realizing that there is a drop off.