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Your Baby Needs Daily Positive Emotional Interactions
Your thousands of joyful interaction with you baby promote brain growth in those areas that control emotional expression and signaling, which in turn makes it easier to fall in love and create a meaningful relationship with you. With the passing of time, your nurturing, happy, animated, interactions with her will foster language development, problem solving and logical abilities, as well as quantitative skills. With this feedback in brain development, there seem to be a circular process: brain growth related to loving, positive emotional interactions lead to a relationship and connections that in turn foster advanced brain development in language, logic, problem solving, and quantitative development. When a baby has an advanced cognitive skills the parents gain more self esteem, happiness, and the motivation to nurture positively which results to a more sustained brain development of the infant. This is a win win situation.
Your interactions with your baby not only promote more connections within her fast growing brain that foster positive emotions but also it starts the foundation for future caring and altruism. As your love and happy interactions brings her into the world, she becomes more excited about sounds, sights, and touches around her. The more sensations she can experience, the richer and more colorful her perception of the environment around her. Because she loves and feels secure around you, she is more encouraged to pursue her interests in the immediate environment which result to more experience that promote more brain growth.
When you smile and your baby return a smile of her own it is her first lesson in logic, or understanding that she can make something happen. This simple exchange of smiles between the two of you makes her realize that by catching your eyes and grinning result to you returning her grin. The more these simple interactions with you resulting to both of you returning the smiles the more she will realize that she can make things happen.
As the weeks passes by, and both of your mutual caring and loving interactions are repeated hundreds of times a day, your baby will learn that human relationship is worthwhile to pursue. She experiences your loving care from the softness of your touch, your sunny smiles, and your gentle voice. Even though she is cranky, irritable, and sad she still get the same loving caring from you. Over time she would realize that human beings like herself are worthy of being cared for.
These early positive interrelationship between you and your baby will be the root of what kind of adult she will be in the future. By showering you baby with loving one-on-one relationship with you, or one of the grandparents, as early as possible, you will make her acquire a sense of shared loving feeling to other members of the family, friends, and neighbors. Babies who are denied the ability to experience love and empathy with at least one caregiver are likely to grow into an aggressive and destructive child or adult, indifferent to the feelings of others.
Now your baby feels that she is part of a relationship and is realizing that the world of emotional relationship is different from the world of material things. Because of her happy interactions with you, positive self esteem blooms. She has now a strong feeling of security and that she is valued and esteemed. And this is the best gift you can give her, a foundation of love and positive emotion.
Leo Leonidas, MD, FAAP
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