Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child (28 page)

Most parents also engage in face-to-face, nonverbal “conversations” with their babies, taking turns making expressions. The mother raises her eyebrows, for example, so the baby raises his. The baby sticks out his tongue and the mother does the same. One partner coos or gurgles and the other returns the sound, using the same pitch or rhythm. Babies typically find such imitation games riveting, particularly if the parent mimics the baby in a different mode. For example, if the baby bangs her rattle on the floor three times, the mother might repeat the rhythm with her voice—something that fascinates her child.

These imitative conversations are important because they tell the baby that the parent is paying close attention to her and responding to her feelings. This is the infant’s first experience of being understood by another person; it’s the beginning of emotional communication.

Experiments conducted with mothers and their three-month-old infants have highlighted the babies’ resourcefulness and competence
at emotional communication. In one experiment called “
The Still Face Game,
” researcher Edward Tronick asked mothers to look at their infants, but to resist the urge to move their faces in the playful way moms and dads typically do with their babies. Faced with this uncharacteristic lack of response from their moms, the babies tried repeatedly to initiate the “conversation” themselves, futilely making one interesting facial expression after another. Researchers observed that the babies attempted an average of four different strategies with their mothers before they finally gave up. In an experiment to study the effects of parents’ depression on three-month-olds, Tronick asked the mothers to pretend to be a little sad or depressed in front of their three-month-old babies. Even this slight change in the mother’s mood had huge effects on the infants. They became more negative emotionally, more withdrawn, and less responsive. Such research shows that even at three months, babies have an expectation that their parents will be emotionally engaged and responsive.

Such research dramatizes that infants are not passive characters in parent-child relationships. Instead, they take a very active role in social play. They seek to be stimulated, have fun, and connect emotionally with their parents.

What happens to infants over time when their parents aren’t responsive, or respond only in negative ways? Researcher Tiffany Field, who has studied depressed mothers and their babies, found some troubling answers:
Babies with depressed moms
tend to mirror their mothers’ sadness, low energy, low involvement, anger, and irritability.
And if a mother’s depression continues
for a year a more, her baby will begin to show lasting delays in growth and development.

The period between ages three months
and six months appears to be crucial in terms of the way a mother’s depression can affect the development of her baby’s nervous system, according to Field’s studies. When she and her colleagues compared two groups of three-month-old babies (one with depressed moms and one with nondepressed moms), the researchers discovered little difference. But when they looked at six-month-old babies, they found that those with depressed mothers were less expressive vocally and had lower scores on tests of nervous-system functioning.

A mother’s depressed state may even influence whether her
baby’s brain processes an emotional event as a negative experience or a positive experience. Scientists can make such determinations by looking at electroencephalographic data (i.e., brain waves) as people have different types of emotional reactions. Negative responses are processed in one part of the brain while positive ones are processed in another.
Using this technology
, University of Washington researcher Geraldine Dawson monitored infants’ responses to watching soap bubbles rise from behind a curtain. Surprisingly, the babies of depressed mothers processed this rather neutral event as emotionally negative.

While such research points to disturbing consequences for babies of nonresponsive, depressed moms, there is reason for hope.
Further studies in Field’s labs
revealed that the babies of depressed moms showed considerable improvement when interacting with their nursery school teachers and nondepressed dads. This opposite effect provides yet more evidence that adult caregivers can have a powerful impact on the emotional development of young children.

At the same time infants are learning to read and imitate emotional cues from their parents, they are working on another important developmental milestone: the ability to regulate the physiological arousal that results from their social and emotional interactions. Many developmental psychologists believe babies do this by cycling in and out of active engagement with others. One minute they are paying close attention to other people, and are responsive to play. The next minute they look away, ignoring adults’ attempts to engage them with toys and baby talk. While parents are sometimes bewildered by their infants’ apparent fickleness, there is some evidence that the baby disengages because he needs to do so. He may be experiencing heart rate increases and a physiological state that’s too overwhelming. He’s like a K-mart shopper after the third blue-light special is announced; he’s overstimulated and eager for some rest. Therefore, he averts his eyes and turns his head, doing all he can to avoid further contact. The baby is trying to learn to calm down.

People who are inexperienced with babies may not realize that they need periods of “downtime.” They may keep trying to stimulate the infant with toys, baby talk, and jostling. The infant, of course, is captive. He can’t ask his overbearing playmate to stop. He
can’t go to another room. He may not even have the physical coordination and strength to bury his head in a blanket. Hence, he must rely on the most persistent and effective defense he has—he begins to cry.

Such instances of “miscoordination” between babies and parents are fairly common. Some researchers estimate that
parents fail to read
their infants’ cues 70 percent of the time! Not to worry, however. Infancy is a time of extraordinary trial and error on the part of parents and their babies. As long as parents are sensitive to their infants, emotional communication will gradually improve and miscues will be less frequent.

My advice to Emotion-Coaching parents, then, is to pay attention to your baby’s moods and to respond to them. If your baby seems suddenly uninterested in play following a period of interaction, give her some quiet time. If your baby gets cranky in situations where she’s being held and talked to a great deal (a family gathering, for instance), take her away to a quiet room from time to time, where she can calm down from all the excitement.

If it seems that the baby has become so wound up that she can’t calm down on her own, do what you can to quiet her. Again, this is a trial-and-error process as parents and babies search for strategies that work best for the individual baby’s temperament. Common techniques, however, include dimming the lights; rocking the baby, talking softly, or walking with her so that she can feel the two of you moving together in soft, rhythmic patterns. Parents also report success with soft music and lullabies, gentle massage, or soft patting. Some babies even seem to be soothed by white noise from a running dishwasher or soft static from an untuned radio.

Research tells us that parents who are more sensitive to their babies’ moods—those, for example, who recognize when babies need to switch gears from highly stimulating activities to more quiet ones—do a better job of enhancing their children’s emotional intelligence. This Emotion-Coaching style gives children more opportunities to experience going from a highly aroused state to a calmer one. In other words, they are helping the babies learn to soothe themselves and regulate their own physiological states.

Parents who respond in soothing ways to their babies’ distress are teaching them important lessons as well. Number one, their babies
are learning that their strong negative emotions have an effect on the world—they cry and their parents respond. Number two, they are learning it is possible to be soothed after experiencing strong emotions. At this age, most of the soothing comes from the parent. But as the baby grows, she will internalize her parents’ efforts and will learn ways to soothe herself, which is an important part of emotional well-being.

By the same token, babies need to have plenty of stimulation in their lives so that they can experience the process of getting thoroughly excited and then calming down again. As we explored in
Chapter 6
, the highly physical games fathers typically play with their babies provide children with this crucial experience.

I also encourage parents to invent and play games that give their babies practice at reading and expressing various emotions. Research shows this can begin by simply imitating something your infant does. The baby sticks out his tongue or coughs and the parent does the same. The baby will then do it again and the game has been created.

Be animated and emotional when you play with your baby, repeating silly phrases and gentle, rhythmic actions. Playing in this way, the baby becomes aware of game routines and learns to anticipate what you are going to do. It’s as if the baby is saying to himself, “Oh boy, here comes that grab-the-toes-and-twirl-the-feet-in-opposite-circles game,” or, “Whoopee, here comes the ‘I’m-gonna-get-you’ tickle game.” When he enjoys the game, he learns to communicate his glee with smiles, giggles, excited kicks, and squeals. Such response encourages parents to be even more playful, creating an upward spiral of loving, fun-filled interaction, which further strengthens the emotional bond between baby and parent.

SIX MONTHS TO EIGHT MONTHS

This is a period of tremendous exploration for babies, a time when they are discovering a whole world of objects, people, and places. Simultaneously, they are also discovering new ways to express and share feelings such as joy, curiosity, fear, and frustration with the world around them. Such blossoming awareness continues to open up new opportunities for Emotion Coaching.

Among the important developmental leaps that typically happen at about six months is the baby’s ability to shift her attention while keeping in mind an object or person she is no longer looking at. In the past, she could only think about the object or person she was focusing on at the time. But now she can look at a toy clown, for instance, be amused by it, and then look at her parent, sharing her amusement over the clown. As simple as this accomplishment may seem, it presents a whole new world of possibilities for play and emotional interaction. Now she can invite you to play with the many objects that fascinate her. She can share her feelings about those objects with you.

To encourage the development of such emotional intelligence, accept your baby’s invitations to play with objects, and imitate the baby’s emotional reactions. This should spur more sharing, more emotional expression.

By eight months, babies typically begin crawling and discovering their environment. But the explorer is also learning to distinguish differences between the various people he encounters, which sets the stage for the first significant appearance of fear. You will see this demonstrated in bouts of “stranger anxiety.” A baby who once smiled indiscriminately at folks in the grocer’s checkout line now buries his face in his mom’s shoulder. While he once leaned willingly into the waiting arms of a new baby-sitter, he now has formed “specific attachments” to his parents, and may cling desperately when they try to set him down in a new setting with strangers around.

At the same time, the baby is getting much better at understanding spoken words, which also helps with emotional communication. Although it will probably be several months before he begins to talk himself, he can understand a great deal of language and is able to follow instructions, such as, “Go get your white bear and hand it to me.” I can recall holding my daughter, Moriah, during this time in her life and saying, “Sweetheart, you look tired. Why don’t you put your head down on my shoulder and rest?” and Moriah would do just that.

All of these new developments—physical mobility, the ability to shift attention, the baby’s special attachment to his parents, his understanding of spoken language, and his fear of the unknown—come together in a skill psychologists called “social referencing.”
This is the baby’s tendency to approach a particular object or event and then turn to the parent for emotional information. Approaching an unfamiliar dog, for example, a baby might hear his mother say, “No, don’t go there!” The baby is able to read the combination of the mother’s words, tone of voice, and facial expressions, and understand the concept of potential danger. On the other hand, the baby might approach a noisy toy robot, look back, and see his mother with a relaxed smile. Now he knows the robot is safe to play with. In this sense, the parent has acquired a unique role in the emotional life of the child, the role of “safe base.” The baby feels free to explore, knowing he can return to this base periodically for reassurance.

When a baby practices social referencing with a parent, it’s a sign that the two are emotionally connected and the child feels emotionally secure. As a result of imitative play learned early in infancy, the child has become proficient at reading his parent’s emotional cues. He knows he can trust signals such as facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. (Here’s an interesting note about the way parental conflict may affect this process: Researchers Susan Dickstein and Ross Parke have discovered that
babies do not practice as much
social referencing with their unhappily married dads, although they continue to do so with unhappily married moms. We think this reflects the fact that men often withdraw emotionally from their children as well as from their wives when the marriage starts to fail. Unhappily married women, on the other hand, may withdraw from their husbands, but they tend to stay emotionally connected to their children.)

To strengthen the emotional bond with babies at this age, I encourage parents to be a mirror of sorts for their children; that is, to reflect back to the child the feelings they are expressing. This is an important part of early Emotion Coaching—helping your child put her feelings into language. Use words as well as your own facial expressions to say things like, “You feel sad (happy, scared, etc.) right now, don’t you?” Or, “You’re getting very tired now. Want to sit in my lap for a while?” If your perceptions are correct, the baby will understand you and show it. Don’t worry, however, if you read your baby incorrectly from time to time. This is a common occurrence, and fortunately, babies are very tolerant.