Unlike talking, testing boundaries, or taming her impulses — falling in love won’t wait.  It’s the first thing she needs to be able to do.

You help your baby learn about love’s prerequisite — trust — when you:

• Provide an emotionally stable environment. If your infant’s human relationships are a source of comfort rather than stress, she learns life’s first love lesson.
• Create predictable care routines. A baby who knows how and when she will be cared for can use her mental energy for curiosity, exploring, smiling — not wondering what will happen next.
• Learn to recognize, then respond to, her cues and cries. For attachment to develop, baby needs protection from the emotional stress of disappointment or neglect.

You’ll know your are getting results from all your consistent, warm, nurturing interactions when you see the following mental and emotional responses:

• Your child begins to show a preference for you, and other familiar faces.
• She seeks out companionship — even before she can use words, she has other strategies for getting your attention.
• You feel connected to your baby when you talk, or play, and also during routine tasks like bathing and diapering.
• You and your baby focus attention together.  If you are engaging her in an activity, she is able to overcome a distraction and refocus on your shared activity.
• You and your baby focus attention on each other.  You make eye contact when you have a “conversation,” you giggle at the same things.

The process of loving and being loved begins with parents and other important people. Offer plenty of attention, and pay plenty of attention to baby’s responses.  Some children take longer to formulate a response, some children need less stimulation than others.

Falling in love truly is for the long-term. Someday you’ll know you have prepared your child well when you see her ability to make and keep friends; maintain a loyalty to herself when inevitable conflicts arise — yet continue to value her relationships; and find comfort in having companionship.

Your newborn’s previous address was insulated against sound, wind gusts, sudden movements, and bright lights.  He never knew hunger — instead he enjoyed a steady and constant supply of nutrition.  He drifted in and out of a blissful haze of napping, stretching, napping some more.

Compared to that personal paradise, life on the outside can be challenging.  Your child now has to learn the complex processes of experiencing needs, alerting you about the needs, then waiting to see what happens.

Your baby will also take on some of the self-care task of regulation.  When excessive stimulation intrudes, he will attempt to shut out the stimuli by turning away, withdrawing, becoming irritable, or even crying or sleeping.  He will show his appreciation for your efforts to soothe him by quieting when you comfort him.

Parents can lessen baby’s stress by observing the cues of overstimulation.  Maintain a household environment that is easy on the senses.  Keep the daily care routines easy for your baby to predict.  Within a few weeks, you’ll be able to notice that your infant reacts when he sees the bottle or breast.

Setting aside time for meaningful interactions will make a difference, too.  By 3 months of age, your child will show excitement by increasing the movements of arm and legs when he recognizes a toy that he enjoys.

Your careful parenting work will pay off.  Signs that your newborn is becoming a settled baby (12 to 16 weeks postpartum for babies carried to term):

• Communication evolves from cries and cues to purposeful, joyful conversations.  Favorite sounds abound.
• Multitasking.  He will be able to nurse and reach for a hand to hold.
• He will like to see your familiar face.  He’ll enjoy exchanging smiles, too.
• Baby develops hobbies, like nibbling on his feet or making saliva bubbles.
• He learns to fall asleep more independently.
• Temperament becomes more consistent.

Within a year, baby will become toddler.  A toddler who can wave “bye-bye”, imitate you, respond to phrases with actions, and know when to say “mama” or “dada.”  He’ll be a fully functioning member of the place you all call home.

The human brain begins forming just three weeks after conception.  At peak development, the cerebral cortex creates 2,000,000 (wait let me count the zeros… yep, that’s two million) synapses every second.  Yes, every second.

Some of these connections form in utero so that reflexes and breathing can be in place at birth, yet others form when stimulated by:

• Baby’s environment (Mother Nature nominates you, Mommy),
• daily interactions (nomination seconded!), and
• the emotional transactions that lead to secure attachment (you just won yourself an election, little lady).

Every experience — from playing giggle games  to realizing that a loved one (a bigger, more capable one) appears in response to a cry, — touches and strenghthens specific circuits while leaving others untouched.  Think “guy at the gym who pumps a lot of iron, but obviously never works out his legs.”

Unused connnections prune themselves away.  As they should.  Streamlined neural porcessing makes the remaining connections more efficient.  Think “it certainly is easier to find the things I need in my pantry now that I’ve tossed the food that nobody was eating”.

By two years of age, a toddler’s cerebral cortex contains a density and quality of neurons that far surpasses adult levels — well over a hundred trillion.  I don’t even know how many zeros to put.  I used to know, but I stopped using the hundred-trillion part of my brain…..

The developing brain (the childhood brain) is far more responsive to stimulation than an adult’s brain.  This is termed “plasticity.”  The most revolutionary finding in neuroscience is the confirmation that all brains, new and old, have the regenerative power of neuroplasticity.  But in this area, especially, babies remain even brainier than the rest of us.

When you respond to your crying baby, your crying baby learns that:

1. It works to use his words (yes, for now, those are his words),
2. His needs are valid (worth speaking up about),
3. You can be trusted, and
4. You are source of comfort in the midst of overwhelm.

Be careful with this process, parents.  You would not want baby to get the wrong impression.  If you don’t pick him up because you think that a young baby can be spoiled, you’re mistaken.  Spoiling and manipulation require a level of brain development and multitasking that your new baby simply does not possess.  Yet.

In the process of attachment, life’s first assignment, the only good outcome is for baby to understand that you are capable of keeping up your end of this bargain he finds himself in.

Simply put:  if he has a problem (hunger, pain, boredom, fatigue, an itchy tag in his onesie), you have a solution.  Like a pendulous, generous breast, or a soothing, rocking motion, or a smiling game, or safety scissors to kill the itchy onesie tag.  If your baby had bigger words, he might quote James Taylor: “you supply the satisfy, I’ll supply the need.”

Think about the future of this infancy and this attachment process:  What would you want your child to believe, understand, know about you when  he becomes a teenager?  A teenager at a party where underage drinking is happening.  A teenager who finds himself in need of a reliable ride home.

In the future, you would want your child to:

1. Use his words to call you and say, “Mom, can you come get me?  Uh … park down the street, though.”
2. Value his safety almost as much as you do (that worth-speaking-up-about thing),
3. Trust that you will not add to the stress of the difficult correct choice he’s in the midst of by showing up yelling, braless, and in your plaid jammies.  Well, in my opinion, it’s a valid choice to show up braless and in your plaid jammies….. just remember the “park down the street” piece of the negotiation.
4. And yes, he needs you to comfort him on the way home, mostly by NOT teachable-ing this moment.

Simply put, you want your lifelong bond with him to supersede his temporary, developmentally-driven bond with his peers.  The foundation for what he believes about himself, you, and this world begins now.  So does the two-way loyalty that will someday insulate against peer pressure.