Episode #26
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[00:00:00] Today I want to talk about something so ordinary that you may never have thought of it as neuroscience at all. And this is your baby's face and your face, and what happens in that half second when your eyes meet. It looks like nothing at all. It looks like a baby looking at his mother. But underneath that completely ordinary moment Something really enormous is happening.
This is what it looks like when two nervous systems are finding each other through the eyes and through the face and without a single word being exchanged. Today, this is episode two of the Right Brain series, and we're gonna dive in [00:01:00] deep on the very first channel that your baby uses to connect with you, and that's your face.
My name is Dr. Lisa Peterson. I'm your host. This is the Create Thriving Families podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me. If you haven't been through the first episode of the Right Brain series, episode number 25, I will link that in the show notes. That can be kind of important to understand what we're going through today, , to listen to that first.
And then we are gonna dive right into this episode number two in the Right Brain series. We're gonna go in depth into why faces matter before anything else, eye contact and the mutual gaze as a channel into the right hemisphere of the brain, doing this through facial mirroring and how [00:02:00] your expressions become your baby's tool for nervous system regulation.
We're gonna talk about the still face experiment. We're gonna talk about what happens when your baby's bid for connection isn't met and how you can build this really important habit of making eye contact and facial engagement a part of your ordinary day. So first off, let's talk really quickly about why I am creating this four-part series, which is all about the development of the right hemisphere of your baby's brain, why that matters.
The right hemisphere of the brain is the part of the brain responsible for everything non-verbal. It's responsible for reading faces, sensing tone of voice, feeling the state of your own body, [00:03:00] and holding your earliest, most basic sense of who you are According to the work of Dr. Allan Schore, who is a research psychologist at UCLA, who has spent over 30 years building the neuroscience case for this, the right hemisphere undergoes a really major growth spurt in the first 18 months of life, which is well ahead of the left hemisphere's more language and logic systems that are developed later on.
The right hemisphere develops not through teaching or through stimulation, but through relationship Through the thousands of small ordinary exchanges of face and voice and touch that happen between a baby and the people who care for that baby. And this matters [00:04:00] because the right hemisphere isn't just an early developing region of the brain, it's the foundation that everything else gets built on top of.
This right hemisphere of the brain , governs emotional regulation, the stress response, and the capacity to feel safe in your own body and in connection with others. And in the 23 years that I have been in clinical practice, I can say that I have seen this again and again, that the children with the most steady nervous system as they grow are almost always the ones whose right brain development was well-supported in that first year and a half.
A well-developed right hemisphere doesn't just influence or shape how things go during infancy, it becomes , the [00:05:00] emotional and the physiological stability that a person stands on for the rest of their life. Their, it builds their capacity for connection with other people, and it builds their capacity , for being resilient and their ability to self-regulate as adults.
This all traces back to how this right hemisphere of the brain was built from the very beginning, and so hugely, important. So I wanna talk about, if we start with this sort of almost like the first language before language develops, why faces matter before anything else matters.
Because long before your baby can focus on a toy or a picture in a book, the human face is already the thing that they find the most interesting in their visual world. It's not a coincidence that it [00:06:00] is this way. It's the way the brain is wired and, and this is where we'll start everything i-i that's to come in this episode.
A newborn's vision when they're born is blurry and it's pretty short-ranged. It's most clear at about eight to 12 inches, which is, you know, not by accident, almost exactly the distance between a baby's face and the mother's face during feeding And within that visual window, research has shown again and again that infants preferentially track and, attend to face-like patterns o-over almost any other visual stimulus that was made available to them.
They prefer to look at things that look like faces when they get a choice. Dr. Colwyn Trevarthen, who is a developmental psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, [00:07:00] has spent decades studying how infants connect with caregivers, along with a colleague of his, Jacqueline Aitkin. The two of them laid out the framework for understanding why this was in a paper that they wrote in 2001 in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
The article was called Infant Intersubjectivity: Research, Theory, and Clinical Applications. And what they were arguing in this, in this article was that, you know, based on decades of observation, that infants kind of arrive here with what Trevarthen calls primary intersubjectivity, which is an innate, something that they were born with, built-in readiness to seek out and to engage with another person's face, and their eyes, and their expressions.
It's like they came here [00:08:00] with the wiring ready to go to, to seek out connection and, and they're just waiting for a face to meet them and, and help them to build that capacity. And this really connects back to what we talked about in episode one. The right hemisphere specializes in faces. It processes facial expression.
The right hemisphere reads emotional tone, and it does those things faster and more automatically better than the left hemisphere throughout the entire lifespan. This is not only for babies. So when your baby, , is locked onto your face, looking at you, looking at your face, she isn't-- This isn't something she's randomly interested in.
She's using the exact part of her brain that she is developing in this window of time for that exact purpose that it's built for And so this is something that I talk about [00:09:00] with mothers in my practice all the time, because you don't need elaborate-- You don't need a lot of stuff. You don't need a lot of toys.
You don't need a lot of visual stimulation in those early weeks and months. Your face is the most sophisticated, most developmentally appropriate visual toy that's available. It's the most right thing for your baby to be spending their days looking at in the early, in those early weeks and months And so things that you will see at home, you'll see that your baby is, their eyes will settle on your face.
They'll be looking right, right at you during a feed and, and you know, staying there, staying on your face, even when there could be, something exciting happening in the, in the vicinity. They're more [00:10:00] interested in looking at you. And you should also see that when you are bringing your face in close to your baby, within that eight to 12-inch range, that should be getting and holding their attention more reliably than if you're holding up a toy or something else for them to look at.
You should see that it's more effective when it's you that they're looking at than something else. And sometimes you'll see babies that will sort of startle or overreact a little to a stranger's unfamiliar face that comes up close before they're used to that. And that's kind of an, an additional sign of how much attention is, they're already paying to the details in faces, that they can recognize that this is a stranger's face and, and it's different than the, what they've been used to seeing.
And a lot of times, you know, relatives or people that that are interacting with the [00:11:00] baby will say, "Wow, they're really, they're really looking at you," or, "They're really focused." And this isn't just, you know, something that's kind of cute to see, but it's really a sign of the right hemisphere doing what it is supposed to be doing during those early weeks, that you can see that they are locking their gaze in on your eyes and your face and your expressions.
And so those are, these are all things that you really wanna be watching for in this window, that your baby is settling into having sustained eye contact during these quiet and alert moments during the day. If that's early in the morning or after, you know, while they're while they're being fed or after having their diaper changed.
These, looking for these windows of that kind of connection time where your baby is quiet but alert, you should be seeing that they are able to and interested in [00:12:00] having more sustained eye contact. And the distance at which your baby seems engaged for really young infants, it, closer is almost always more effective than , getting them to look at something that's farther away.
And if you, you know, another thing that you can be looking at during this first window of time, these first months of your baby's life, is that you should see that, if they can choose between a light or, something happening in the room around them in those first weeks and first couple of months, you should see that they're more interested in having those face-to-face moments than looking at something else that's happening around the room.
And so these are the kinds of things that you can, can be doing during the day, is when you're having these quiet but alert times during the day, bring your face in close and let your baby [00:13:00] look at you and, and be making faces and having expressions on your face and being engaged with them over, looking for toys or looking for something else that is, can be distracting to them.
You don't need to feel pressure, again, to buy really visually stimulating products for a young infant. Your own face is the most important developmental tool that you can have. And you can also, you know, without putting judgment on it, but you can notice how often a screen or a really busy environment is competing for that attention that otherwise your baby would be putting on your face.
You know, if there's too much happening in the environment around the both of you, it can take away the time and the ability for your baby to be able to really have just that quiet [00:14:00] time where what they're doing is they're building their right hemisphere. So just being aware of things like that In this next part, I wanna talk about this, you know, what actually happens during eye contact.
Because eye contact between a mother and a baby, it's sometimes you as the mother can think it's sort of one that's information going one way. You're the one looking at your baby. But this is, you can think of it as a two-way back and forth kind of circuit. This is what you can get that is close to a conversation, although there is not yet, words and language in that sense.
Both you and your baby are participating in this eye contact between the two of you. We talked earlier about Colwyn Trevarthen, the researcher, and, and this concept of primary intersubjectivity that we talked about. It's not, it's not just that [00:15:00] babies like faces. What he's trying to, the claim in this research that he's done for decades is that infants engage in s- what he calls proto-conversations with their caregivers, which is this kind of rhythmic back and forth exchange of their gaze, their eye contact, their, mimicking expressions and vocal sounds before they're speaking specific words that follow that back and forth structure, just like a conversation is back and forth between two people long before there are actual words that are involved.
And so your baby looks at you, you respond, your baby responds to your response. This is the, this back and forth in facial expressions and in eye contact and in, making sounds that is helping to build the right hemisphere of their brains. [00:16:00] There's a researcher at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute whose name is Dr.
Beatrice Beebe She and her collaborator called Frank Lachman, they developed even further upon this idea by using frame-by-frame video analysis of mother-infant face-to-face interactions. And they wrote a book called Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-Constructing Interactions. And this book documents this split-second coordination between mother and baby.
The timing is so precise that it happens in fractions of a second, and neither the mother nor the baby is consciously controlling what's happening in these interactions. And Beebe and Lachman the term for this is interaction structures. These [00:17:00] are predictable, mutually built patterns of gaze, expression, and timing that the mother and the baby construct and develop together moment by moment that's across hundreds of tiny exchanges throughout the day and specific for that mother and that baby, the two of them together.
And so It's fascinating, and the thing that I think matters the most for mothers to know is that this loop, this repeated loop that happens, thousands of times across the day, which is, looking at each other, the response of either, sounds that are being made or mimicking of expressions that are going back and forth is sort of how it works.
It's in the repeatedness of it happening many times throughout the day. It's not one ... It's not how well your baby is able to hold your one long [00:18:00] unbroken stare. It's not in, in one instance, but it's the loop itself. It's that they come back again into, the mutual gaze, the response, the gaze again, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, so many times throughout the course of the day.
And you'll see that babies break ... You know, when they've been having eye contact with, with you as their mother or their caregiver for a period of time, they will break that gaze and look away, and that's ... we'll talk more about ... It's not that they're doing ... Something's going wrong. It's, it's not a failure of the, that circuit that we're talking about.
It's part of, part of it all, and we'll come back to why that is i, in a minute. But, you know, when you're at home with your baby in those first weeks and months, what you'll see is that, during this time where you find them in this quiet but alert state and you see a window of opportunity, you'll notice [00:19:00] a rhythm to it.
Your baby's looking at you, you look back. Your baby looks away, they look back. They're coming back to and looking for connection and contact with you, and they will often check in visually while they're doing something else. You know, they'll look at your face when they're in the middle of looking at something or playing with something or in the middle of a feed or, exploring something in their environment, and that is also part of the same circuit that we're talking about.
And if you see your baby sort of having an avert, like looking away, turning their head to break their gaze, this is very common, and it's usually a sign of the nervous system sort of taking a break. It's not that they're not interested, and it's not rejection, but it's the nervous system taking a little bit of a break from this circuit of back and forth because it's stimulating their brain to be doing this.
And so them looking away or turning their head [00:20:00] to have a break from this, this visual, this mutual circuit back and forth between the two of you is, again, a pause for the nervous system or a break for the nervous system. And one thing that's interesting is when you see the research on this for parents of twins or parents of multiple, babies, they will almost notice this circuit really clearly because each baby will have a little bit of a different, rhythm of how they do this pattern with, with each of the parents.
It's not the same for every baby. It's specific to that baby with their parent. And so again, things that you can be watching for in this window is seeing that that is happening, seeing this rhythm of, them, looking at you, having this interaction back and forth between the two of you, and then eventually, you know, breaking the gaze.
And you [00:21:00] wanna resist the urge to sort of chase them down. When they're looking away, you don't wanna be sort of following them, trying to force yourself into, back into eye contact. Let the baby have that break and allow them to reengage with you. Most babies will come back to your face on their own timeline if you just sort of stay available and present with them and don't force it.
And, some things you wanna look for also in this window of time is you'll, you'll see something about your own comfort with sustained eye contact. Some parents will find this much more natural than other parents, and that's just something to notice. It's not something to have a judgment about, but just to notice and think about that the comfort that each of us has with eye contact is something that we've developed back during that time when each of us was that age, those first weeks and months.
And so it's something that you will be sort of noticing about [00:22:00] yourself because your baby is in that period of development. So again, you as their mother, you let your baby set the pace of this gaze circuit. You stay available and you stay responsive, but don't chase after eye contact when your baby looks away from you.
Treat those breaks as something that's normal, something that's expected, not a sign that you've lost your baby's interest or you've done something wrong. It's they're just taking a little bit of a break. And those, you can notice the small, those sort of repeated loops of looking at each other and responding to each other and then, looking away and then coming back, as you can see so many of those repeated experiences throughout an ordinary day.
And again, the repetition of that is how it's working. That's how you're building the right hemisphere of the brain. [00:23:00] It's not through one single dramatic moment that tells you that, you know, they're doing what they should be doing. It's seeing that they're, they're looking for that connection and looking for that to happen many, many, many times throughout the day.
This next section is about facial mirroring, how the expressions on your face become a tool that your baby uses for their own nervous system regulation. Because your facial expressions are not just communication for, something that you're communicating f- to your baby. They are functioning as a regulation tool, and they're helping your baby to organize his emotional and nervous system state in real time as it's happening.
And this, you know, builds directly on the right brain to right brain communication that we talked about in the first episode of [00:24:00] these right brain series. Allan Schore's framework, which, describes mothers and babies continuously matching and adjusting and modulating each other's affect, which they do largely through facial expression in a process that, the researchers call affect matching or attunement, you know, building attunement, building attachment.
The, book and the researchers that we, I referenced before, Beebe and Lachmann, who made these frame-by-frame videos of mothers and babies, their work can show this happening in fractions of a second. It's, you know, the mother lifts her eyebrow and within a split second, the baby's own face begins to shift in response to that expression.
Neither the mother nor the baby is doing this deliberately. It's automatic, it's mutual, and it's happening constantly. And, this is more than just something that you can see a [00:25:00] mother and a baby doing that looks cute. It's, it's really interesting to think about what it's doing functionally. You know, for example, for a baby who is under-aroused, who is flat or disengaged or a little bit checked out, that baby can often be brought back into engaged and alert and, connection through a parent's animated, exaggerated facial expressions.
You know, making faces at the baby or looking at them and making big movements of their own expression. And for the opposite, for a baby who is over-aroused, who is overstimulated, who is on the edge of being overwhelmed, can often need the opposite. They can need a parent whose face is slowing down and quiet and softening.
And in both directions,, your face is sort of functioning as this external [00:26:00] regulator for a nervous system that isn't yet able to regulate itself And the truth is that not all mothers, you know, myself definitely included, sometimes by 5:00 in the afternoon, you just can't make your face do all the things that you could make it do at 9:00 in the morning, right?
You're tired, and that's true for every single mother I've ever worked with and myself. And so it's not about, a performance that you're doing for your, for your baby on, you know, you have to be constantly just delighted and engaged. The point is that your goal during this period of time is having responsive, matched connection enough times across the span of the day that your baby's nervous system, their right hemisphere, is getting what it needs.
And it doesn't, [00:27:00] you know, if they're getting what they need throughout the course of a day and throughout the course of a week and the course of a month, having a tired face in the afternoon doesn't undo all of that work. It's not about it being perfect all the time. It's not about you constantly being there to, be making faces and making all the sounds and doing all the...
It's not about that. But it's about being a place where your baby is able to find you present and engaged and meeting them there More often than you're not. Not that it has to be perfect every single time. And so this at home looks like, you know, if you see that you have a baby who is disengaged or who seems flat and, and you see that they brighten up when, one of you leans in and has, animated expressions and wide eyes [00:28:00] and a big smile or, you make a noise or you say something to them, that's a sign that this, you know, this is exactly what we're talking about.
And if you can see that you, the, you know, the opposite, you have a baby who's fussy or they're getting themselves into overwhelm, and you see that if you just slow it down, you know, not getting in their face and making big expressions and making big, you know, funny noises, but the opposite. When you slow yourself down, you'll see your baby's nervous system matching that.
You can see that this calms them and it soothes them. This, again, is a sign that, of exactly what we're talking about. And you'll feel yourself, for most of us it happens so automatically we don't even think about it, that your own face automatically mirrors your baby's expressions throughout the day.
When your baby smiles, you smile. When your baby gets a concerned look on their face, you know, you'll do the wrinkling with the eyebrows and have that concern. You're, you are mirroring their expressions in the same way they do that for you. And again, [00:29:00] for the majority of us, it's happening subconsciously.
It's something we're not even aware of, and you can see it with the majority of all mothers and babies throughout the day if you watch them. And sometimes an overstimulated baby, when, again, talking about what this looks like at home, sometimes an overstimulated baby will turn away from an overly animated face, which is just a cue that they're looking to dial down the intensity for their own nervous system to give themselves a little bit of a break.
And again, it's not them rejecting you, it's just them needing a pause in terms of their own for their own nervous system. And so things that you can watch for in this window is whether your baby seems to need, more energy from you, from your face being bright and animated, or less stimulation from you, depending on their state.
[00:30:00] Seeing that your own, you know, you're automatically mirroring your baby's facial expressions as a sign that this right brain to right brain circuit is actively engaged and actively doing what it should be doing. And then using these signs of overstimulation, fussiness, arching away, turning their head, averting their gaze.
This is a cue to you to slow down and soften your face and soften your voice rather than increasing engagement or continuing with whatever you're doing. So you're matching them where they, where they are and with what they need. And so these are all things that you can be looking at doing, as a mother throughout the day to be helping your baby, again, to be developing the right hemisphere of the brain and to be developing this responsive connection across the day.
And there was an [00:31:00] interesting, one of the most cited experiments in developmental psychology is talking about how distressing it is for a baby when a parent's face suddenly stops responding But what they found that was even more important than this in that, this research is how important it is for the baby and the baby's development in what happens after that, which is the repair of this, you know, when the baby is distressed because they're not finding that connection, how important it is and how much it rebuilds that with the repair of that connection again.
This is from Dr. Edward Tronick, who is a researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and he first developed what's known as the still face paradigm. This was back in 1978, and he has continued building on [00:32:00] this. A lot of it was summarized in a, a book that he published in 2007 called The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children.
And the setup of the research is simple, but the footage of it is really striking because the, what they did was they had a mother who engages normally with her baby. She's talking and she's smiling and she's responding. And then on, on a cue from the researchers, she holds a completely still blank face for a short period.
She's offering no response to her baby at all. And the baby's reaction sort of happens in a pretty consistent sequence. The baby will try harder to reengage with the mother, reaching for them, making noises, vocalizing, trying to, you know, smiling more intensely or trying to make more, exaggerated expressions.
And when the mother then doesn't, when that doesn't [00:33:00] work, the baby looks away, shows distress, and in some cases begins to shut down. And then the mother resumes her normal responsive engagement, and the baby recovers usually quite quickly and settles back into this connection and back and forth with the mother.
And so, the point of the, this experiment is that ruptures like this happen constantly, even in the most healthy, the most attuned relationships. The research talks about this with the mismatches and the disconnections. You have a parent who looks away or who misses a cue or who is momentarily distracted and these can occur a lot during the day in ordinary interactions with your baby, not just in a, in a laboratory setting.
You know, it's not about you as the mother never looking away or never, you know, 100% of the time meeting your [00:34:00] baby's bid for connection. It's about the fact that you come back The still face research isn't a warning that if you have a single distracted moment, it's gonna damage your baby. It's evidence that this pattern of it rupturing where you weren't there to meet them this, the second that they needed it, when it's followed by repair over and over, this is how resilience gets built, which is a, a theme that we're gonna go much deeper on in episode four of this Right Brain series, that this resiliency built in our children is incredibly important for the rest of their lives.
And so, and, you know, mothers don't have a lack of guilt about, anything, that we're, we all think we're doing so much wrong throughout the day. And so if somebody brings up that to me in my practice, one of the mothers who brings their babies in talks about checking their phone [00:35:00] or being distracted or having had a hard day where they felt like they just weren't able to be as present for their baby as they would have wanted to be, the, again, the, what the research supports is very reassuring.
It's, the return into that connection that matters, not an unbroken record of perfect engagement all day, every day. Thank goodness, right? And so things like that, being distracted with, if you have more than one child, you know exactly how many times you are distracted from your baby during the day because you have somebody else who's saying, or several other small people saying, "Mom, Mom, Mom," 75 times during the day.
You know, these things are not about that brief moment of you not responding to your baby. It's all about, when your baby will protest, you'll see them be fussy or you'll see them making sounds to try to get your attention or, or being [00:36:00] fussy they will quickly settle back into responsiveness and connection once you come back, once you see them, once you meet them again where they are and, and bring that connection back.
And so that is really the important thing to remember about this, research that was done. So things you wanna be watching for with regards to this is, how your baby signals a desire to reconnect with you after there's been a distracted moment, if they're reaching for you, if they're making sounds, if they're looking.
And just you being able to notice that and to respond to that signal. And, the difference between a brief ordinary break in connection and a really long stretch of unavailability, both of those are worth thinking about, but they're not... [00:37:00] again, what the research is really focusing on is how important that reconnection and meeting them again, their bids for connection, whether it's been a, a brief break in that connection or you've been away for a longer period of time. Finding them, meeting them, having eye contact, having that connection between the two of you when you've been away, when, if you've noticed you've been distracted or you're disconnected or you return for being away during the day, make eye contact with your baby.
Respond to their cues. Re-engage with them. That return to that connection is what's doing the developmental work. And so, again, the research is not there to make any of us feel guilty about missing a moment or, or being away from them. It's all about how important it is to build resiliency for our kids when we come back and they realize we're back, and we're back into the connection, and we're meeting them again where they are [00:38:00] And so this next section, we're sort of getting towards the end here.
This next section is all about, how to build these things that we've been talking about, making eye contact and, and facial engagement and, these ways of meeting your baby through these things, through your face and eye contact, building that into what happens during an ordinary day.
So it's not about setting off dedicated practice time to do these things. It's about how you do these within a day that's already happening. You know, feeding your baby, changing their diaper, putting them in their car seat, putting them in the bath. These times during the day are already full of really natural openings for this kind of connection.
And so if you step back and think about, if we look at the, these different researchers that we've talked about just during this episode, [00:39:00] who are sort of looking at it from different angles, they all agree on, they all converge on this, on this way of thinking about it as being something that happens throughout the day.
Colin Trevarthen and his work that we talked about on primary intersubjectivity that, shows that babies already arrive in this world wired for seeking out and engaging with faces We have Beebe and Lachman's, this frame-by-frame video analysis showing mothers and babies co-constructing these split-second patterns of gaze and expression together thousands of times a day.
Alan Shore's framework that talks about facial connection and, how facial connection is right at the center of right brain to right brain communication. And the same mechanism that we talked about in the last episode that this [00:40:00] is the basis that is helping your child to develop their sense of self, who they are.
And Edward Tronick's, the still face research that shows what happens when the connection breaks, and more importantly, what happens when it's repaired. These are four separate research programs that are sort of agreeing on the same basic picture. Face and eyes, face and eyes, face and eyes over and over and over across an ordinary day is where a huge amount of this developmental work happens, not in a block of, like you would block off tummy time, you block off bonding time.
It's in the things that you're already doing, in putting them in their car seat that you're already doing. You know, meeting their eyes, making eye contact, looking at their face, matching their expressions, seeing if you can feel something in their nervous system that needs help being regulated.
And so these are the things we talk about a lot in, I [00:41:00] talk about a lot with the mothers that are in my practice. You don't need to be doing anything new in your day. You look at what's already available to you in the moments you're already having, and then you just make sure to be present and engaged and meeting them and just, letting your face do what your face is already built to do.
It's not, it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. So, taking these opportunities, feeding time, which is just a natural built-in window for whether you're feeding them, you know, breastfeeding or bottle feeding, this is a time when you have the, the pause in the day for face-to-face connection.
Thinking about, when you're changing their diaper, this is another very natural face-to-face window if you just slow down a little bit and make eye contact and, make noises or sing songs or make, you know, make faces or whatever it is. Things that you wanna th- also with really small babies, if you have a [00:42:00] forward-facing stroller, these are, that you don't see your baby the same way that you would if you had a a stroller that, where they were turned around and looking at you.
That's something that you could be aware of, you know, thinking about what you're, what kind of a stroller you're getting And screens, you know, your screen or, you know, in some cases, people are thinking that showing their baby something on a screen even, in those first weeks and months, these are the most common sort of competitor for this kind of face-to-face window that would otherwise be happening really naturally during the day.
So being really, being aware of that as a competitor for this natural devel- these developmental windows. So thinking about that, thinking about how often a phone or a screen or general, you know, being busy during the day competes for attention during those natural windows. Slowing down, being present, taking [00:43:00] a breath, being engaged, having, you know, being where you are That is sort of the clue from there, it all kind of falls into place automatically.
It's when we're distracted or when we're- things are moving too fast where we often miss those windows. So, if you wanna think about a, a takeaway, something that moms can be doing, think about those things that, you know, choose one or two windows during the day, whether it's feeding or, just periods of time where your baby is alert and awake, and bringing your face in close and making eye contact and being present and being responsive without, thinking you need to add something extra.
And, in the earliest weeks and months, thinking about having a, a positioning for being in the stroller or if you're, baby wearing during the day in those early months, having your baby turned toward you so that they can see you, not turned away [00:44:00] from you where they can't, where there are no faces.
This is something that can be really developmentally helpful and stimulating for your baby in those early months. And noticing, again, without feeling guilty about it, but noticing where screens compete for your attention, or your baby's attention during these windows. So just being aware of those. And so, the things that I, I want for you to take away from this episode, first of all, the human face is the most compelling visual object in your young baby's whole world.
This is the entry point for this right brain connection that we spent the first episode, the last episode, establishing and talking about as the foundation for early development. And the second thing to think about is that the eye contact isn't it's not you looking at your baby, it's a circuit between the two of you.
It's, meeting each other's eyes, a response between, a facial expression shared [00:45:00] between the two of you or some kind of a vocalization, a noise that one of you is making or both of you, that back and forth. And, and these are built together by the two of you thousands of times a day, and mostly in these really small, ordinary moments that I'm sure that you are having already, but maybe you haven't been thinking exactly about what's happening during those, during those times.
And so that's why I think that these episodes are important, so that you know exactly what's happening, what kind of neurodevelopment you are supporting When you are connecting that way with your baby. And again, this still face research that we talked about, this isn't, meant to be warning you about if you miss a bid for connection from your baby.
Every mother misses those bids for connection during the day. What the research is showing is that coming back, reconnecting, resuming that [00:46:00] connection, that's what's doing the building, not a perfect, never ending, never missing anything, being available 24 hours a day. That's not the point. The point is the return and the reconnection upon the return And so this is the bridge to our next episode, episode three.
We talked today about the face and the eyes, which is the first channel that your baby uses to read you. And in the next episode, next week, we're gonna talk about two more, which is your voice and your touch, and how both of those reach directly into your baby's nervous system in ways that do not require language in any way for them to be understood.
And so I hope that something in this episode really resonated with you. I hope this can allow you to think a little bit differently about what's actually happening while you're feeding your baby, or what's [00:47:00] actually happening when the two of you are laying in bed looking at each other and, having that back and forth.
What it, what's actually going on. And I go, we're gonna be going deeper into all of this over the next episodes. This Right Brain series I think is really exciting in the way that it sort of breaks such ordinary everyday things that we as mothers are doing, and breaks it down into exactly what's happening and why it's important.
And I think that is one of the things I really live for, being able to talk about and do. So if you are more interested in anything that we talked about, I say this every time, but there's a full reference list for every study and every researcher that I name in this episode that is available in the show notes.
And I want every mother who is listening to this to be able to, if you wanna read the research yourself and decide how you, you know, if, what this means for you and what it, if it means something important for things that you're doing with your [00:48:00] baby, then I want you to have access to those.
And if you're interested in reading more, I have a lot of free articles on Substack. If there's something, I talk a lot in depth about neural development for our kids as well as, you know, these podcast episodes. So you, I will put a link to my Substack in the show notes as well.
Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you in the next episode. Until then, be well.
