Your Baby: Becoming a Two-Way Communicator

How does your baby learn to be purposeful and logical? When does he start using his ability to communicate to make things happen? When does he first discover the differences between "me" and "you"? All of these important advances are emerging during this vitally important stage. When your baby is between three and ten months of age, he'll start to show you that he expects more out of your relationship. His ear-to-ear grins are produced not only in response to your wooing, but to entice you, too. They reveal just how much he wants to be in charge and make things happen. Because he trusts and loves you, he looks to you to exchange signals. It's as though love is no longer enough; now he wants a dialogue, too!

Your baby is becoming a two-way communicator. He may already be reaching out to you with his arms and hailing you with a steady stream of babble that's sure to bring you running. Soon he'll propel himself across the floor to be near you, and search your eyes for a response. Long before he is able to talk, you'll be responding to his smiles, frowns, and body movements with gestures of your own. A preverbal but amazingly expressive kind of gestural language will be developing between the two of you.

Most parents still operate under the mistaken assumption that their baby's initial spoken word is the first real sign that language ability is developing. We eagerly record those da-da's, ma-ma's, and bye-bye's in our children's baby books, and worry that there is something very wrong if our baby hasn't produced his first word by the time he is a year old or so. If he is a late talker, we try to reassure ourselves with the thought that even Albert Einstein didn't say much until he was nearly four years old. But we still have an uneasy feeling that our baby may be "slow" or unsociable if he isn't precociously chattering.

We now recognize that all the preverbal gestures your baby uses purposefully, and not only the syllables he lisps, are the real signposts of his growing ability to communicate. The back-and-forth smiles, frowns, giggles and looks of surprise, annoyance, or delight that we sometimes take for granted are the true source of his growing logic, sense of self, and intelligence. All babies, from slow learners to eventual winners of the Nobel Prize, must master the purposeful use of gestures, ideally during this period. If mastery isn't achieved now, it must be reworked at a later stage of the baby's development. In fact, when we see older children in our clinical practice who show various difficulties in using words to communicate, we often observe that aspects of this more basic, gestural ability are missing. We then work with them to use and respond to a wide range of gestural signals, such as hand motions, finger pointing, shoulder shrugging, facial expressions, and vocal tones.

Your baby will be sending you countless gestural, nonverbal messages about his needs and intentions long before he is able to utter his first word. Your baby's ability to use a rich variety of facial expressions, actions, and sounds in a back-and-forth dialogue with you during these months will enable him to interact with the world in a purposeful and logical way.

In the coming sections we'll be detailing how to encourage this sort of "can do" spirit in your baby. As you play give-and-take games with him, you'll actually be helping him give purpose and meaning to many other experiences he is having. When your baby reaches for a toy you offer him, he's simultaneously learning to pay attention to the sound of your voice as you encourage him, and to adjust the position of his hand in response to what he sees as you hold the toy up in the air. He's practicing his sounds and motor skills in a purposeful way, even as he's having fun playing a give-and-take game.

When your baby touches your face and puts his fingers in your mouth while you are making mooing or clucking sounds at him, and you playfully lick his fingers, he's not only fine-tuning muscle skills but also realizing that pleasure, delight, and even downright silliness can be part of a back-and-forth communication. He's learning to be a purposeful sender, and not just a receiver, of love. His love for you motivates him to search your face, body, posture, and voice for signs that you're reading him loud and clear.

Your baby's preverbal logic is forming right before your eyes. As his facial expressions elicit a response from you, and as his touches and pats prompt your return hugs, he's beginning to learn that his responses are intentional and lead in turn to other reactions. If he could talk he might say, "If I do this, she'll do that. Hey—I can make things happen! The world can be purposeful and logical." In fact, as you play give-and-take games with your baby, he's also learning that his intentional looking, listening, smelling, and reaching skills can all work together. This ability to bring together. or integrate, all of his behavior will be more fully developed in the next developmental stage, when he is approximately 9 to 18 months old. In the meantime, you'll be surprised at how much his mastery of gestural communication broadens his sense of purpose and supports the beginnings of his logical understanding of the world. Your baby's actions really will speak louder than words.

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