Create Thriving Families Podcast Intro
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Create Thriving Families podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Peterson. I'm a doctor of chiropractic, and I've been in private practice for 20 years, seeing mostly women, babies, and children. The Create Thriving Families podcast is a place for us to have a conversation about how we can help our children become the healthiest, most vibrant, and aligned version of themselves, the full expression of who they came here to be.
The quality of our lives and the quality of our relationships is dependent on the quality of our health, and I believe that the greatest gift any of us could give to our children is the best start possible when it comes to their own health. I can't wait to see where this journey takes us. Let's get started.
Welcome to this two-part miniseries within the new [00:01:00] neurodevelopmental series which I am creating, which is going to end up being, in total, eight different podcasts. Two that we're starting the first part of today for the zero to three-month window, two for the three to six-month window, two for the six to nine-month window, and you get the idea.
And what I wanna talk about in this series is what's actually happening inside your baby's brain in each of these developmental windows. My hope is, for this series, is to give mothers the full guided tour of their baby's neurology during the first year. But I wanna try to do it in a way that is actionable and practical and tells you what you need to be doing to [00:02:00] support each of these phases so that you can know what you're seeing in each of the areas of the windows of development and have some practical things that you can be doing yourself.
So each of these timeframes, the zero to three-month window that we're starting today, part one is all about what's actually happening inside your newborn's brain during the time wh- from they're first born until they're three months old. The next part, part two, coming out next week, will be about what you should be seeing and doing in your everyday life with your baby during the zero to three-month window.
So let's get started today. By the end of this podcast today, I hope to give you a little bit of an understanding about the first [00:03:00] three months of life for your baby. They're not a, a passive, resting newborn period. These are some of the most intense brain-building windows of time during the entire first year, and I want all moms to understand that you're working on...
There's a, there's a wiring happening beneath the surface. The brain stem is coming even more online. The autonomic nervous system is organizing itself. Primitive reflexes, the ones that the baby was born with, are doing their job to integrate and to build more complex movement patterns. The sensory and the motor systems are starting to integrate, and the right brain During this first year of life is being shaped by relationships.
So I want you to be able to sort of understand that the things that your baby is doing don't always [00:04:00] necessarily look like that much of a big deal, but it's a very big deal, and I wanna give you a little bit more of a clear picture of why you're doing the things that you're doing and why they're important during these first months.
So if your baby right now is in their first three months of life, I want you to really understand that what's happening inside this little body is so much more than you can possibly see, and they're building the foundation that everything else, sleep, feeding, learning, attention, regulation, even the way they will one day handle stress as a teenager, all of this is resting on the foundation that they're building during this window of time, and it's, m- it's mostly invisible.
We've been told that the newborn period is about feeding and sleeping and surviving, and that's just an incomplete [00:05:00] picture. So there's a reason why these first three months feel so consuming, and that is because your baby's brain is doing more work right now than at almost any other point in their development, and you are pretty much completely the environment that that work is happening inside.
So let's talk a little bit more about what's-- what we're gonna go through during this, the rest of this episode. I wanna talk about how, you know, something that I repeat almost every single episode, and that is brains are built from the bottom up, and I wanna talk a little bit more about why this, why this matters.
I wanna talk about the autonomic nervous system that's coming more and more online with vagal tone and building a social engagement system. I wanna talk about primitive reflexes, which I have already talked a lot about, but I think they're, they're [00:06:00] imperative to be going through as, as a part of this series of podcasts.
I wanna also talk about the vestibular system and the proprioceptive system, which are sometimes senses that you have never heard of or thought about, but how foundational those systems really are to building the foundation for the brain that your baby is going to have for the rest of their lives. I wanna talk about how movement is brain building.
Movement is everything during this period of time. During the entire first year of life, movement is not just watching your baby roll around on the floor. It's building their brain, and it's really important. And I wanna go through how during this first year of life, and specifically during this zero to three-month window, the right [00:07:00] brain is being built in terms of attachment and what that means for what we as mothers are doing every single day with our newborns.
So like I said before, the baby's brain develops from the bottom up. The brainstem and the parts of the brain that handle survival and regulation and rhythm, those are sort of the foundational circuits, and everything else builds on top of that foundation. I want to just reference a couple of the books and the research and the information that I'm gonna be using in each of these sections.
And the reason why I'm doing it this way is because in my practice, I have a lot of mothers who are really interested in this information and who wanna be able to find whether it's articles or books [00:08:00] or, you know, following people on their blogs and on their podcasts and in the books that they've written and the podcast that they're doing.
And so I'm gonna reference everybody that I'm sort of using for the foundation of this episode in case there's somebody that you wanna read more about. The first is Bruce Perry, who is a child psychiatrist, and he has worked with thousands of children with early trauma and adversity, and he developed something that he called the neurosequential model.
The really simple way to put this is that the brain develops in a fixed order from the brainstem at the bottom up to the thinking brain at the top. The brainstem and the lower sort of more regulatory structures, those organize first. These are the parts of us that run our heart rate, our breathing, our temperature, when we're asleep and when we're awake.
And only once those are [00:09:00] working and working well can the next layers of the brain do their job. During the first three months of life, the brainstem is doing a tremendous amount of foundational work, and that has to come first The second is a woman called Sally Goddard Blythe and the team that works at the Institute for Neurophysiological Psychology, and they have spent many decades showing that the structures that we are building in the first months of life become the floor that the rest of the child's neurological development stands on.
And when the foundation is well laid, everything that comes after that, attention, coordination, learning, behavior, is much more likely to come together smoothly. And when the foundation is disrupted or skipped, sometimes the cracks don't show up until [00:10:00] much later. So in-- when we're talking about the brain being built from the bottom up, what are we actually seeing at home?
What we're seeing is that newborns spend their days cycling through states, things like deep sleep, lighter sleep, being drowsy, being alert but quiet, being alert and active, and crying because the brain stem is rehearsing the regulation of all of those states. So everything that they're doing when they're sleeping, when they're breathing, what their heart rate is, how their temperature is, all of those things that a newborn seems to be just doing are actually the brain stem learning to run the body smoothly.
And when a newborn gets [00:11:00] unsettled in a way that doesn't sort of match the situation, they start crying when, you know, you're thinking everything should be-- "I've done all the things. I've changed the diaper, and they've had-- they've fed, and they've slept, and everything should be fine," that's often a sign that the, this lower part of the brain is having to work harder than maybe it should in order to stay regulated.
So you can think again of your baby's brain as the house being built. The thinking brain is at the very top upstairs. The emotional brain is in the middle on the main floor of the house, and the brain stem is at the bottom or the foundation And you can't build the upstairs of the house before you build the foundation.
And the first three months of their lives are really about laying the groundwork here. So when you're supporting the things that they're doing every day, when [00:12:00] you're supporting them sleeping and trying to establish good feeding routines and learning how to calm them and learning what the different cries mean and trying to figure out your rhythms, you're not just keeping your baby alive.
You are laying the wiring for the foundation that everything else in their life is going to stand on. So what are some things that you should be watching for during this first zero to three-month window? Things like having smooth transitions between states. You know, your baby moves between sleeping and feeding and being alert but quiet without huge amounts of dysregulation each time.
And by dysregulation, I mean being fussy, crying, not being, you know, happy or peaceful during those [00:13:00] transitions. And of course, they're not happy and peaceful all the time, but when there's a lot of dysregulation in between states, this is something to keep your eye on. If you have-- if you're seeing periods of quiet alertness where your baby is awake, they're calm, they're looking around, this is a sign that the brain stem is in good shape.
This is a sign that they're able to have periods of this, you know, being awake, being calm, and being content. And they're, they're, you know, in a newborn, they're not doing this for hours at a time. But if you're seeing periods of it, that's a good sign. You wanna sort of see the time between when they're first born through the first three months where they're kind of getting into more of a rhythm, although not a, a set routine between how they're sleeping, how they're [00:14:00] feeding, how their digestion is working, how often you're changing diapers, all of that kind of stuff.
You're sort of seeing it from feeling like y- there's no, there's no rhythm to any of it in the very beginning to sort of having an idea of more of a routine starting to develop. And also looking for a baby who can be soothed back to a regulated state with help You know, when you're holding them, when you're rocking them, when you're talking to them, when engaging in try- contact with them, when you're feeding them, that they can be soothed back to finding a regulated state.
This isn't something they're doing on their own, but it's something they're doing with help from you or from another caregiver. So things that you wanna think about that you can be doing during this [00:15:00] time is not pushing for progress, but sort of protecting around the space and the time that the body needs for the brain stem to be organizing itself.
Giving your baby time to be building the foundation, not stressing it, and working to prioritize more of a, a rhythm over a schedule. When you have predictable, repeated patterns of doing things, repeated patterns of how you do bedtime, or repeated patterns of how you do holding them when they are-- when you're working on...
When they're in a dysregulated state and you're trying to calm them. When you're sort of doing those things in the same way that they can kind of recognize, even that early on, [00:16:00] that is how the lower brain stem is learning regulation. So you wanna think about soothing your baby as brain building. Every single time you co-regulate with your newborn, you're giving the lower part of the brain stem kind of a working model of what regulation feels like.
You're exercising the muscle that they will be needing to strengthen throughout their entire childhood, and working on l- teaching themselves how to self-regulate. But in the very beginning, they're learning that from the work that you're doing co-regulating. And I think something that's really important during this time is slowing down for us as mothers, because this isn't...
These first three months, that's not a time to be thinking about [00:17:00] everything that's productive. It really needs to look slow, and, and not have a hectic or stressful pace to the life that you're living during those first three months with a new baby. I think that's really important. The autonomic nervous system is s- also something that is coming more and more online during these first three months of life.
And the autonomic nervous system is the part of the nervous system that runs everything that you don't have to think about. So it's everything that is all of your rest and digest systems, that's your autonomic nervous system. And it's-- the groundwork is also being laid during these first three months that is going to become your child's baseline for how they [00:18:00] handle stress, and this is something that is, is really becoming the foundation for the-- how they handle stress for the rest of their lives.
Some of the references or the important works that I think can be interesting to read more about in this area, Stephen Porges, who wrote The Polyvagal Ther- Theory, he is a neuroscientist, and his core idea of his books, if we try to just put it simply, is that we have some main settings of our nervous system.
One is the calm, connected, social setting, the one where we feel safe, where we make eye contact, where we can rest and digest and connect. And another is the protective setting, the fight or flight or the being in response mode to threat. [00:19:00] And a baby is born with a very immature wiring between these settings, and they spend the first months of their lives trying to learn, primarily through us, how to find the calm, connected setting more easily.
They're not-- They're born in a more sympathetic state or in a more fight or flight state, and they learn over time as their nervous system is developing to be in a more rest and digest mode, which is where connection and learning and self-regulation happens. So they're training their nervous system to be in-- to find that calm and connected setting more easily.
The vagus nerve, which runs from the brainstem down through the body, is the main, if you wanna think about it as the main wire [00:20:00] doing this work. And vagal tone, which a lot of us have heard about and read about and it's becoming more and more popular, it's sort of how well-trained the wire or the vagus nerve is, how well the vagus nerve functions.
And Stephen Porges' work I think is fascinating for parents who wanna learn more about exactly how a developing nervous system learns safety and connection. And so I think his book is great. There's a man named Allan Schore. His work on early development sort of underlies the same as Stephen Porges. He talks about the autonomic nervous system during the first year of life as not running on its own.
It's being shaped by the regulation of the caregiver. And when the parent is calm and the parent is attuned, the baby's nervous system borrows that [00:21:00] calm. And the opposite is also true. When the parent is stressed or unavailable, the baby's nervous system has to work so much harder, and over time, repeated experiences become wired in as the baby's default.
So what kind of things is this actually looking like in everyday life? A baby-- When you're seeing that your baby quiets down when they're held by a caregiver who's calm and settled and regulated, or when you see that they become unsettled or dysregulated when they're handed to somebody who's stressed, that's them reading the other person's nervous system, which means that they're able to do that.
If there's a lot of dysregulation or a lot of crying where you're sort of seeing a baby that seems [00:22:00] like they're having a hard time or like they're more easily stressed out and they have a hard time finding their way back to regulation, that's maybe an indication that you're-- the wiring is still under construction, that you're still working on building the foundation of...
And this building of the foundation, it's not something that's done when they're three months old. This is something that you work on for years. But you should be able to see from the period of time where they're c- just newborn to about three months, that they are having-- you're having an easier time soothing them and helping their nervous system find its way back to regulation.
Other signs of autonomic function That's being built is when you're seeing sort of more regulation in their digestive system, when you're seeing that they are developing more of these sleep patterns and feeding patterns, and sort of [00:23:00] things are starting to get onto a little bit more of a schedule, although not a specific schedule just yet.
At three months old, that's a lot to ask. And if you're seeing that your baby can settle pretty quickly with rhythmic rocking or movements or talking to them in a low, calm voice or dimming the lights or skin-on-skin contact, this is a sign that their social engagement system is being supported and it's developing.
So you wanna think about this again as your baby being born with a nervous system that has different settings. One is the calm, connected setting. One is alert and in protection mode. And they can't get themselves into the calm setting on their own just yet. They need you to be there in the calm setting.
You have to show up yourself in the calm setting so they can borrow it from you. So when you're regulating yourself, you're regulating your [00:24:00] baby, and your nervous system is sort of their... It's the environment that your baby's nervous system is growing inside of. The vagus nerve is a main nerve or the main wire that's helping your baby learn to calm down, and every time you soothe them, you're sort of training that function or training that muscle.
And this is also why your own nervous system as a mother matters so much in the early months. You're not just their parent, you're their nervous system environment. So that's an important thing to think about. So things that you want to keep your eye on during this zero to three-month window in terms of the development of the autonomic nervous system is that they, your baby's having an increased amount of time spent in calm but alert states by the end of the first three months, and they're starting to have more of these [00:25:00] cues of social engagement.
They're having eye contact a little bit. They're tracking your voice. They are engaging in facial and body language cues in more of a way than they were doing when they were first just newborn. Also wanting to see a baby who can be brought back from being upset by being held or being rocked or being fed within a reasonable amount of time that's working to soothe the baby.
And Also, other autonomic signs are having, hearing that their breathing settles and seeing that their body relaxes when they're being held and, and those sort of their... If they've been crying, that they, their faces go from red back to normal color fairly quickly after they've been upset. Things like that show you that the internal rest and digest development in the body is working the way that it should be.[00:26:00]
So you wanna think about having a handle on your own nervous system, because this is something that definitely affects your baby more than you realize, and it doesn't at all mean that it needs to be perfect. This is an incredibly stressful time of life, so it doesn't mean you have to walk around feeling perfectly regulated and happy and peaceful all day, every day.
But thinking about how it feels to be around you is a really important thing, because that's the antenna that your baby is l- is picking up on all day, every day. And being really cognizant of things like holding your baby skin to skin, rocking them, thinking about the tone of your voice, thinking about eye contact, looking at them, being face to face.
These are the social engagement inputs that those systems [00:27:00] need to be building during that time. And notice what helps your baby find their calm setting, and repeat it. You're not... So once in a while you hear somebody say that you're, you're creating bad habits by picking up a baby who's crying all the time, and I always think, I wonder what it looked like when all of us were babies.
Because that's just not the case. You're not creating bad habits by being attuned to what your baby needs. You're training their nervous system that this is a safe world, and when they need you and when they need something, you're there to respond. And again, you're helping them to learn what will eventually be self-regulation by working through co-regulation.
I think it's also really important to protect the sensory environment of your home, of your space in the first three [00:28:00] months. You want it to be as predictable and as low stimulation and as low stress as you can possibly have it during the first three months of your baby's life. In the next section, I wanna talk about primitive reflexes, and I've talked a lot about primitive reflexes before on this podcast.
They are purposeful i- wired in movements that are training your brain to mature They are not random movements. They are reflexive, automatic, non-voluntary movements, and they are-- some of them are present at birth. And what their job is, is to work on training the brain into, from more primitive movement patterns into being able to [00:29:00] support more mature or more sophisticated movement patterns later along, a lo- later in life, later down the line.
Some of the, I think, best resources when you're looking at things like primitive reflexes, S- again, Sally Goddard Blythe, she has written so many books that I think are so great for parents, and she has one called Reflexes, Learning and Behavior, and she describes primitive reflexes as the original movements of life.
And these are automatic motor patterns that emerge before birth or just after birth, some of them. Some of them come a little bit later in life or later during the first year of life, and they serve a specific purpose. Those-- Everything from helping the baby be born, uh, being able to feed in the very beginning, being able to turn their head, being able to push against [00:30:00] pressure.
And as the baby uses the reflex, the very act of using the reflex stimulates the next level of brain development. And so once the next level is in place, the reflex has done its job. It gradually integrates, which means it stops firing automatically, and it gets controlled by a more mature, more voluntary way of moving.
Peter Blythe, who is Sally Goddard Blythe's husband, was the founder of the Institute for Neurophysiological Psychology, and he was one of the first to systematically link retained primitive reflexes, reflexes that should have disappeared or should have become integrated but didn't, with later difficulties in attention, learning, behavior, and coordination.
And his work really showed that when these reflexes [00:31:00] do their job on time and are integrated properly, the rest of the neurological development unfolds much more smoothly. There's a, also a man called Harold Blomberg, and his work in rhythmic movement training is sort of the same understanding that rhythmic, repetitive movements a newborn makes naturally, like kicking and wiggling and turning their heads, that's the brain's own training program for maturing the brainstem and integrating these reflexes.
So the movement is the, it's not random, it's the actual mechanism of brain building, and it starts at the very beginning of life. So primitive reflexes from zero to three months, what you should be seeing, there's a reflex called the Moro reflex, which is where your baby, uh, throws their arms wide and usually takes a big breath in or gasps when they're [00:32:00] startled.
And this can be everything from sudden movements or sudden noises, and it's, this is the, the alarm system of the nervous system. And it should be there in the very beginning. The rooting reflex and the sucking reflex is your baby turning towards touch on their cheek, and that sort of instigating or i- initiating the sucking reflex.
And this is the feeding system that they're practicing, the ability to be able to feed themselves. The grasp reflex is when your baby holds onto your finger when you stroke their palm, and this is wiring tactile feedback into the d- the motor system. And the stepping reflex is if you hold your baby upright and their feet touch the surface, they'll sort of make a stepping movement like they're, they're trying to walk.
And this is laying the early pattern for upright walking, even at this age. And the last reflex is called the asymmetric tonic neck reflex, and this is when [00:33:00] your baby's head turns to one side, the arm and the leg on that side stretch out or extend, and the arm and the leg on the opposite side move inward toward the middle of the body.
And this is teaching or programming the eyes and the hands to find each other, if we're putting it very simply. So it's important to think about that these movements that kind of look very random sometimes in newborns are purposeful patterns, and every one of them is a job that your baby's brain is doing on purpose.
Each primitive reflex is like a, like a scaffold. It shows up, it does what it's supposed to do, and then it sort of quietly integrates so that the next level of skill can take over. So all of these movements are training your baby's nervous system for something specific. [00:34:00] And movement is the full-time job of the newborn.
It's what they should be doing from zero to three months. The freer that your baby is to move, to wiggle around on the floor, to kick when they're happy or excited, to make those big startle motions that you see for the Moro reflex the more efficiently these reflexes can do what they are supposed to be doing and integrate.
So you wanna be looking for all of those reflexes that I talked about in just now, the Moro reflex, the rooting and the sucking reflex, the grasp reflex, stepping reflex, and the asymmetric tonic neck reflex. And you wanna make sure that they are happening on b- that it looks symmetrical, that it looks like they're doing the same thing on both sides of their body, with the exception, of course, of the [00:35:00] asymmetric tonic neck reflex.
But when you turn their head to the right and you see that the right arm and the right leg extend and the left leg and the left arm come in toward the middle of the body, the opposite should be happening when you turn their head the opposite way. So you wanna make sure that it's symmetrical from right to left pretty much.
And what you can be thinking about at home is giving your baby as much unrestricted time on the floor as possible so that they can move freely. You wanna try to keep them out of all of the containers that we put babies in these days. You wanna keep them out of seats and swings and bouncers. And I know sometimes you just need them to be in a place where you can, uh, make sure that they're safe while you are doing something else.
I know sometimes they need to be contained in something, but you wanna think about the amount of time that they're in car seats and they're in swings and things [00:36:00] like that. Keep it to a minimum as much as you can. You want them to be spending time on their tummies as m- you know, for as, as long as you can from very early on, and as long as you can is not very long with a newborn.
It can be a couple of minutes at each time on a good day when they're in the mood. But this is one of the most important inputs for the postural system and for several of the primitive reflexes. Thinking about things like skin-to-skin contact and s- stimulating their sensory systems with things like, it can be everything from massage, touching their skin, singing, um, having them, different colored toys and different kinds of toys that they're able to hold and play with and look at, and different sounds and different music and singing to them, and as much sensory input without it being [00:37:00] overstimulating all the time is important.
And if you're seeing a reflex, a primitive reflex, and it looks to you like it's asymmetr- asymmetrical, it looks like it's strong on one side or weaker on the other or you can't find it at all, tr- it's-- that's a good sign to try to find a clinician that's trained in neurodevelopment. When there's asymmetry during the first months, it's worth taking a closer look, and that is something that a clinician who's trained in this will be able to help you with.
The next section is all about building the vestibular and the proprioceptive system. And what are the vestibular and the proprioceptive systems? They're the body's sense of balance and position. So it's telling the brain where the body is in space. And these are two senses that almost nobody talks about, and they shape everything.
Because if you don't [00:38:00] know where your body is in space and you're not able to keep yourself upright, that's a core foundational, um, the, the bottom of the, the bottom of the floor of the house. You have to be able to n- keep your sense of balance and know where your body is in space before you can think about anything else happening.
And there are a couple of references that I think can be really helpful when it comes to this. There's a woman called Jean Ayres, and she is an occupational therapist who founded the field of sensory integration. She made the observation that the vestibular and the proprioceptive systems are the most fundamental of all of the senses.
And the vestibular, the sense of balance, it tells the brain whether the head is upright, tipped, if you're moving, if you're still. Proprioception, again, is the sense of where your body is in space, [00:39:00] and it mostly lives in the muscles and the joints, and it tells the brain what the body is doing without having to look to see.
These, both of these systems begin developing before we're born, and they are well underway during the newborn period. They're the framework on top of which all of the other senses get organized. So these are foundational. There's a woman called Lucy Jane Miller. She has sort of built on the works of Jean Ayres and kind of taken all of it and worked to integrate it into our modern times, our modern lives.
And she talks again about The newborn's vestibular and proprioceptive systems getting the input that they need from being held, being rocked, being [00:40:00] repositioned, being gently moved, being carried, that it isn't... This is developing their core wiring. So I think both of those women can be very interested to look into more if you're interested in this.
So what kind of things should you be seeing at home? You should be seeing a baby who calms down in the moment they're picked up and held against your body. The vestibular and the proprioceptive systems are receiving the same kind of input that they recognize from y- being inside the womb. And a baby who quiets down when they're being carried while the parent is sort of walking slowly around the room or bouncing up and down, the bending their knees and bouncing a baby who's, who has been unsettled.
A baby who startles a lot or who becomes quickly unsettled when they're laid on their [00:41:00] backs on a still surface, that can be a sign that the vestibular system is, is looking for input. They wanna be picked up. They wanna be held. They want that stimulation to their vestibular system. It's not happening when they're laying flat on their backs.
So thinking about holding your baby, carrying your baby, rocking your baby, they're not, uh, things that you c- you know, optional comforts. These are the input that two of your baby's most important senses need in order to grow and to develop. The womb was like, before being born, that was like a 24-hour proprioceptive massage.
So when you are holding your baby or w- having your baby in a sling or wearing them, you're reminding them of a very familiar piece of their environment that, that they knew during all of those, that, that period of time before they were born. And if you feel like your baby calms [00:42:00] down and is easier to settle when you walk or when you bounce them or when you rock them, this isn't, they're n- you're not, this isn't your baby being demanding.
They're looking for vestibular input. So you wanna sort of be watching out for those things. Be watching out to, for things like it being calming to your child to be held and to be gently moved, and you wanna see that they can tolerate changes in their head position as long as the head and neck are being supported.
Um, you wanna see them start to have the beginnings of head control when they are Laying on their tummies and when they are seated while supported by you, obviously there's no zero to three-month-olds who can be sitting on their own. But if you are supporting them in a seated position that you're starting to see better head control than they had in the very first weeks of life, that's the vestibular system starting to activate postural control.
And that you, again, can see [00:43:00] them be able to be soothed by familiar movement patterns, walking, rocking, swaying, bouncing. So things that you can do as a mother, you can be holding and carrying your baby a lot. The wearing and walking and rocking, they're not creating bad habits, they're wiring these foundational senses.
And when your baby is awake and content, have them on the floor. Make sure that they're kicking and wiggling and moving around, both on their backs and on their stomachs, and, and these sort of things are giving the vestibular and the proprioceptive systems really good input. They should be spending as much time as possible on the floor moving during the day.
And you also want to think about varying positions. You want to give them time on their back, time on their side, time on their tummies, time in your arms. Uh, each position is feeding the system in a different way. And be [00:44:00] cautious about long stretches of time in containers, in car seats, in swings, in, in bouncers.
These restrict the movement that these developing systems really need. So you want to think about, again, the, in the first three months, movement is not the result of brain development. Movement is what's causing the brain to develop. So every time they're moving and kicking and stretching and reaching for something, that's feeding the growth and the development and the wiring and the connections in the nervous system.
There are a few resources that I think can be really helpful when you're looking at movement as brain-building food. Uh, one of the women who I think is really good in this is a woman called Esther Thelen, who is a developmental scientist, and she, she sort of [00:45:00] upended the way the field was thinking about infant motor development.
Her work is called dynamic systems theory, and it showed that movement is not just an output of the brain. It is one of the inputs that builds the brain. And so every spontaneous movement is generating feedback through the muscles, the joints, vision, and balance systems, and that feedback is what teaches the brain to organize itself.
So movement is the experience that the brain learns from. There's a woman named Karen Adolph And her lab at New York University has produced the most recent research on how babies actually learn motor skills. And the big finding that they've repeated across studies is that babies learn through enormous amounts of variable repeated practice.
They're not learning through perfectly executed [00:46:00] movements and milestones. They're learning through thousands of tiny attempts and mistakes and adjustments and trying again. And every one of those attempts lays down important neural wiring. There's a book called What's Going On In There? written by Lisa Elliott, and her synthesis of the early development literature makes exactly the same point.
It's experience builds the brain, and movement is one of the most powerful experiences that a young infant can have. And the brain wires around what the baby actually does. So we build our brain dependent on what we're asking of it during the day. And that's really important to think about. So when your baby is laying on their back and kicking and stretching and, you know, wiggling, they're working on their own training program.
So let them do it. [00:47:00] Let them have some time. And you'll see that sort of slow, repeated attempts to lift the head or when you can sort of see them struggling, when you can, you know, you're sitting there thinking, geez, that's a big head on top of a really small, tiny neck. What they're doing is they're wiring more and more during each attempt.
Even when it looks like they're not able to do it or they're bobbing their heads or they're not really getting it or it looks hard, they're building the wiring. They're building the foundation. And there will be more smoothness and more intentionality to those movements by the end of the first three months compared to the newborn phase, I promise.
But let them do that. Let them have as much time as they can during that phase. So you want to be looking at symmetrical, varied movement, both sides of the body moving pretty much similarly. And the [00:48:00] beginnings of what's called midline behavior. So their hands are coming together. Their eyes are able to find their own hands.
They're sort of improving their head control with each week that goes by, even if it's just for short periods of time. And a baby who seems to enjoy moving when they are awake and alert. So they should be finding little periods of time during the day where they're actually enjoying themselves being on the floor moving.
So making floor time part of the rhythm of your day, even if it's in short stretches, but doing it often so that you're giving the brain the input that it needs, and resisting the urge to come and save them every time they get stuck in something. There's a little bit of, it's okay to pause for just a second and give them a, a little bit of a chance to try to see if they can figure it out, building the wiring and giving them a chance to, um, to have some [00:49:00] time doing it even when it looks like they're struggling a little bit.
And again, I never mean leaving a baby to cry on the floor, but giving them a little bit of time to, to fight with it, sort of. And you also wanna think about not trying to, um, force them into hitting different milestones. You know, you'll see a lot of parents who are trying to have them sitting up early.
They're propping them up and using different things, or they're using devices to keep them in positions that they can't get into by themselves. You shouldn't-- A baby shouldn't be sitting until they can sit on their own. So you can obviously hold them upright in your arms, in your hands, but you don't wanna be putting them into some kind of a, a container that allows them to sit upright before their spine and before their muscles and before their brains are able to support that, that movement.
So watch your baby move. Let them move. Resist the urge to constantly [00:50:00] intervene, because what they're doing is they're working on the wiring. That's, that's what's actually happening. There are two sections left to this podcast, so we're getting closer to the end. And what I wanna talk about a little bit, um, now is that there is a, a right brain priority happening during this first year of life.
The right side of the baby's brain is developing ahead of the left side, and it's being shaped almost entirely by the relationship with the primary caregiver. So this is what they talk about when they talk about attachment. If we're looking at the neurology of attachment, it's not just emotional. It's one of the most powerful [00:51:00] neurological events of the first three months.
So there's a couple of really good resources. There's a man called Allan Schore. He is the researcher whose work m-mapped what's happening in the right hemisphere of the brain in the first year of life. And the right side of the brain is the part of the brain that handles Emotional regulation, body awareness, facial recognition, tone of voice, the f- the sense of being safe in a relationship.
And in the first year, this is the part of the brain that's growing the fastest, and it grows in direct response to the quality of the right brain communication with the mother or the primary caregiver. So lots of eye contact, lots of facial expressions, tone of voice, touch, timing, those are building this part of the baby's brain.
There's a man called Daniel Siegel. He's written [00:52:00] some fantastic books on parenting, and he translates this work into a framework he has called interpersonal neurobiology, and his core idea is that the brain is built through relationships. The connections between neurons in the developing infant brain are shaped by the connection between the infant and the caregiver.
And so it's a s- attachment is a structural development. Um, there's a man also called Edward Tronick, and his research on infant-caregiver interaction showed how fine-tuned even very young babies are to how emotionally available their caregiver is. When the caregiver is engaged, the baby's system stays organized.
When the caregiver becomes flat or unresponsive, the baby's system [00:53:00] disorganizes, and they're working very hard to try to re-engage the caregiver, and this is happening even during the first months. Your baby is reading you constantly. And I just wanna say that I, I think this is really important to be thinking about when we're thinking about how often we, as adults, are looking at our phones.
So I don't want to, um, you know, it's not about making anybody feel bad about anything, but I think it's worth thinking of that us looking at technology instead of looking into our babies' faces, and they're having eye contact and making facial expressions, and obviously I'm not talking about doing this 24 hours a day.
But when your baby is looking for contact with you, it's really important for them to find you there. So things like a baby who's locking eyes with you while they're feeding or having [00:54:00] When you start seeing that your baby's getting into from two to three months and they're really looking at your face really intently.
I love this when I have little babies who come into my practice. When you- I'm bending right down over them and I'm looking at them and I'm looking in their eyes and you just, that moment of connection and seeing how their faces light up and how they start to smile and how some, depending on the age, they'll start to try to be opening their mouth and making noises and making sounds.
And you can see that they respond immediately to someone who is looking for and, and c- in contact with them, looking right into their faces. You can also see it with, if you ha- when your baby is quieting down when they hear your voice or becoming more alert when they see you or hear you. And you can also see it starting to happen during this period of time that when your baby is handed to a stranger or someone whose nervous system feels different [00:55:00] than your nervous system feels, that you'll see that they can become a little bit fussy or a little bit dysregulated.
So your face and your voice and your touch and your eye contact are building the part of the brain that's gonna handle and, and be in control of your baby's emotional life for the rest of their lives. So attachment is not just something that is psychology, it's, it's neurology, and the relationship that we have and we're building with our babies, that's the wiring.
And so they're reading, your baby's reading you all the time, and they are taking it all in, and it's shaping the development of their brain. And this is why being really attuned matters more than being perfect. They're not looking for, um, you know, you're not, it's not about being perfect all of the time.
It look, it's, it's about being the one who's there and who they can rely on and who they can count on [00:56:00] and who they can, who has predictable behavior. So things you wanna watch for during this time, you wanna see that your zero to three-month-old is becoming more and more interested in your face, more interested in your facial expressions, more responsive to your facial expressions.
And you're gonna wanna see that they're starting to do the first voluntary smiling. That usually happens somewhere between six and eight weeks, but that they're starting to respond by smiling when you're stimulating them. And so you can see this in everything from the tone of your voice or smiling at them or making big facial expressions or singing or, and you'll see that they will smile.
Also thinking, looking at the length of time where they are able to be looking at you and [00:57:00] g- and keeping eye contact and being visually engaged. That's important that you see that becoming a longer period of time. So things that you can be doing at home, being face-to-face with your baby often. Hold them at the right distance for their vision, which is about eight to 12 inches, and let them s- look, let, let them study you.
Let them look at you. Talk to them, sing to them, make s- let them see how your face moves and how you smile and how your f- how your tone of voice sounds, and talk to them in a way that feels natural. This is input that the right brain is wired to be taking in, and if connection breaks down, the wiring in the brain is, is, uh, all about...
It's not about never leaving. It's about repairing and coming back, and sometimes you just need to take a shower, and your baby ends up crying for five minutes while you do, and this is not the [00:58:00] end of the world. But when you are out of the shower, then you're picking them up, and you're trying to soothe them, and you're working on rebuilding the connection.
You need to also be tending to your own nervous system because the more regulated you are, the more your baby's brain has to work with. So the first three months of life are one of the most intense periods of physical brain growth that your child is ever going to experience, and this isn't abstract.
The brain is measurably bigger, more connected, and more organized at three months than it was at birth. There's a woman called Rebecca Nichmeyer, and sh- she has done the UNC Early Brain Development Studies, and they used MRI imaging to actually measure how the brain [00:59:00] grows during the first two years of life.
And what they found during these development studies is that the brain volume increases by about 1% per day in the first months after birth, with the cerebellum, which is the part of the brain that handles coordination and balance and a lot of higher functions, is growing the fastest. So the white matter, which is the wiring that connects different parts of the brain, is also rapidly expanding, and I think it's so fascinating to actually...
I mean, if you think about 1% per day in the first months after birth, that's amazing. So things that you can be looking for at home, visible head growth. Your baby's head is measurably bigger from being checked during, as a newborn to as the time progresses during the first three months. And you're starting to see a little bit more organization or a little bit more of a predictable [01:00:00] routine when it comes to feeding and when it comes to sleep and when it comes to being able to calm your baby during these three months.
That you're seeing that the underlying wiring is starting to improve, and they're becoming a little bit more predictable, and that usually feels like you're finally figuring out newborn language. You're able to hear the difference in what they need, see the difference in their states, and know how to respond to them effectively, and that's partially because you're getting better at it, and it's partially because their brain is developing.
You should be seeing more frequent and longer windows of alertness, and that is a sign that the brain is developing more capacity and more coordination between systems. So you should see them looking and reaching and hearing something and turning their head, or that their, their breathing and their swallowing and their sucking are all [01:01:00] becoming more synchronized.
They're becoming better at feeding. So your... The brain that your baby was born with, that's not the brain that they're gonna have when they're three months old. It's gonna grow, again, about 1% per day, and it's not just getting bigger. It's getting more connected, more organized, more efficient. The wiring is being put in.
And when you understand the scale of what's happening, you stop thinking about it as a phase of time where not much is happening until they get a little bit older and a little bit... things start getting a little bit more interesting. You're seeing this period of time, this zero to three-month window, as one of the most important construction, house construction projects that's happening.
So keep an eye on their head cir- head circumference. Um, be looking for more visual focus, longer periods of time where they're awake, [01:02:00] more tolerance for stimulation, that they're more able to be in the world without being overstimulated. And a kind of an overall sense of who your baby is becoming, that you're seeing that they're more responsive, they're more present, they're more, more reactive and responsive to you and to other people in their environment.
So- Mothers, you wanna be thinking about there's a lot of things that you can be looking at as brain building. When you're thinking about what they're eating, their nutrition, that's what they're taking in is becoming incorporated into their growing brain. You wanna think of sleep as brain building. This is some of the, the fastest growth and connection forming is happening while they're sleeping.
You wanna think about movement and holding them and talking and singing and being face to face and having, spending time on the floor. All of these are feeding the construction of the [01:03:00] neurology. And just, I think, again, like we talked about before, just thinking about slowing down the expectations during this window of time and thinking that what you're doing right now is you're supporting brain growth in another human being.
It's a full-time job. So be easy on yourself and how much laundry you have building up in the laundry room. It, it will wait for you. That's at least been my experience. So some of the... These are the things that are happening under the surface in your baby's first three months. The brain stem is coming more and more online.
The autonomic nervous system is organizing. Primitive reflexes are building the foundation for more mature movement. The vestibular and the proprioceptive systems are being shaped by every time you're holding them and bouncing them and rocking them. Movement, their movement is building the brain. [01:04:00] Also, the right brain is being wired by the relationship that you are building with your baby, and the whole thing is growing by about 1% per day.
So this is not a passive period of time. This is one of the most active, important neurological periods of your child's entire life, and you are there with them. So everything that y- you do matters. And in the next part, the part two of this series, we are going to take everything that's happening under the surface and look at what you will actually see and what you can do to support this building of the nervous system.
So if you haven't already, please follow the show. Please follow this podcast so that the next episode lands in your podcast library when it drops. And sharing the episode is also something that [01:05:00] I would love for you to do. I would love for these episodes to be shared with another mother who is pregnant or who is in the trenches of the first three months.
This is the kind of message that can really- change how a mother looks at this season because it's a really tiring, hard, emotionally draining time of life. All of us who've been there, there's a reason we can barely remember those first three months, because there's a lot happening. So please share it if you know someone who could gain something from listening to this episode.
And again, thank you so much for being here and spending time with me today.
Thank you again for joining me today for this episode. I hope you found something valuable in the time we spent together, and I hope you'll join me again next week on the Create Thriving Families podcast. Until then, be [01:06:00] well
