But nowhere is the neutral palette more prominent than in the nursery. On social media, the decorative trend has been dubbed “” parenting. Marked by ivory walls, natural wooden toys, neutral clothing and a conspicuous absence of primary colors, the “beige baby’s” room leans toward a chic aesthetic rather than a playful one.

The term “sad beige” began as “” by on TikTok in 2021, as a satirical reference to fashionable parents who want their children to grow up in style. Over the years, the has seen an uptick in beige hues, but there’s been over whether and how the trend shapes infant development. Vision and psychology experts suggest that a beige nursery shouldn’t hinder a baby’s development, though it may be a bit of a bore for them.

Thank you for the sad beige feature @buzzfeed these are the ones that started it all

“Honestly, I would have no concerns about the beige baby trend affecting children’s vision or their eyesight,” said Courtney Aldrich, an instructor with the child and family development team at Michigan State University who provides programming for early learning professionals and parents. “At such a young age, they’re not even able to see the decorations on the walls.”

An infant’s vision and brain development are closely linked, according to Dr. James D. Reynolds, a pediatric ophthalmologist and chair of the department of ophthalmology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. 

“Especially the eye and brain, it’s a very complex symphony,” said Reynolds, whose research focuses on the fetal retina. “I like that analogy because an orchestra with just one instrument playing, yeah, that can be entertaining, but when all the instruments are playing and they’re not all playing the same notes, it’s a very complex structure. And that’s how the retina brain develops.”

As never before, scientists have access to experimental methods and machines that enable them to understand the neural mechanisms occurring as babies become children and learn to navigate their environment. With every scientific discovery, wonder deepens. The following stories offer a glimpse into some of the extraordinary research at the heart of these discoveries.  

When you see a baby gazing on the world, you might imagine a little sponge passively soaking up information, but what’s actually going on is sophisticated computational wizardry that outpaces any known machine. Millisecond by millisecond, the baby is sorting multiple data feeds and running statistics to analyze the environment. “No computer, no matter how sophisticated, can do what a baby can do in listening to language input and deriving the words, grammar and the sound contrasts that create language,” says language expert Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington. 

After babies grasp the basics of “mama,” “dada” and ”baba,” and understand that they can summon important people and items with a word or two, they soon move on to two key words in human development: ”�³󲹳�’s that?” Babies occupy a world of wonder, and their senses are bombarded with new information at every turn. From their first moments, human infants are driven by the desire to find out. Their investigations are fueled by the same mechanisms that scientists use to develop theories. Babies are exploring their world in ways that are exquisitely intelligent, sensitive and scientific.

Adults are encouraged to get sufficient exercise to support their brain health. As it turns out, cardiovascular health appears to equate to better cognitive function for children as well, with benefits observable as early as 4 years old. Scientists found that preschool children with higher cardiorespiratory fitness scored higher on tasks related to general intellectual ability as well as in their use of expressive language. They performed better on computerized tasks requiring attention and multitasking and showed the potential for faster processing speeds and greater resource allocation in their brains as they performed the tasks.

Fascinating research tells us that the baby isn’t the only one growing and changing when an infant is born. The intense caregiving required for newborns causes observable changes in the brain of the caregiver: They develop “parenting brain.” Those changes aren’t limited to the biological parents, they occur in the brains of everyone intimately involved in caring for the baby. It’s not just that some people are hardwired to be a parent, people become parents by how — and the degree to which — they respond to the child they’re caring for: The act of caregiving, not simply the act of giving birth, calibrates the brain.

Babies are born with brain connections for functions such as hearing, sight and movement. The white-matter pathways associated with language are also present at birth but continue to develop over the years. Scientists have found that these neural connections don’t simply grow, they are cultivated by their environments, and research shows that early interactive language experiences uniquely contribute to the brain development associated with long-term language and cognitive ability. The more back and forth between babies and parents, the greater the growth of the brain in areas critical to the child’s ability to learn language and build vocabulary — effects that carry through early childhood and predict cognitive and linguistic ability into adolescence.

Before COVID-19, one in five young people in their lives, and since 2020, almost half of high school youth reported having , a decline by half from a decade earlier. Hau calls this “relational scarcity” and concludes that while kids need strong early relationships to thrive, those same relationships are among the single strongest predictors of a child’s later success and ability to overcome adversity. 

Hau’s new book, “Love to Learn: The Transformational Power of Care and Connection in Early Education,” tackles this crisis head on, with all indicators pointing toward the power of early care. She includes her own personal story: A psychological test at age 3 concluded that Hau had “low academic aptitude.” Her parents, undeterred, enrolled her in a high quality public preschool in France with strong teachers, where she formed attachments and thrived. “I believe that this moment of benefiting from high quality early education made a huge impact. Which is why I have focused on early childhood education as a huge part of my academic life,” she says in an interview with journalist Rebecca Gale.

The conversation below is edited for length and clarity. 

Your book talks about the need for children to have a robust network of relationships, including with people they are not related to, and how this has changed in recent generations. How can parents and families make a shift going forward?

Isabelle Hau: This is why I wrote this book because I am very worried about where we are regarding “relationships circles” around children. We have a huge body of science that says relationships matter for children in life. However, children are more and more isolated, and while there’s more discussion on loneliness and isolation among adults, I believe that the problem starts in the early years. 

We have children in very small family units: The number of families with only one child over the past 30 years. And it’s intergenerational; have at least one grandkid who lives more than 200 miles away. And only 3% of children with someone above age 65 that is not their direct grandparent. 

There is lots of really on the benefits of [intergenerational relationships]for the child and for the elderly person, and also benefits for the middle generation, the parents. 

How can parents grow their relationship circles?

That starts as a family unit, increasing the number of relationships and making sure the relationships within the family unit are very strong. Turn family time into relational time. I know it’s not always possible for every family, but ideally dinner time is together without any technology interruption or devices at the table. 

To expand the circles of relationships, there are a few things that families can do. Ensure that kids play — focusing on free play, and prioritizing relationships with little ones and families. It sounds also really obvious but with kids who are more and more scheduled, there is less and less time to make those friendships and enjoy free play. Even playdates have become more and more structured these days. 

You have many examples about how our COVID-era policies had detrimental effects on our youngest learners. Can you talk more about why that is, and what else we can do to overcome it?

There is a reason one of the greatest punishments in incarcerated systems is to have people in solitary confinement, because it is one of the greatest human tortures. 

It had a huge impact [during COVID] to be confined at home with minimal interaction. ECE educators are still observing a number of issues at this point. Kids are having more and more issues socializing with others. 

Parents were expressing some concern for older kids too. I was looking at that shows more than 20% of children at this point don’t have a friend. This was for any child, ages 6-12, as expressed by parents. 

And these concerns have seen a shift since COVID?

The challenges we’re seeing today didn’t start with COVID. Even before the pandemic, children were playing less and spending more time on technology — reflecting broader societal trends that predated COVID. However, the pandemic amplified these concerns significantly.

One deeply troubling data point comes from during the pandemic. She studied a cohort of mothers giving birth at the onset of COVID-19 in New York City and tracked the emotional connections between mothers and their babies. Alarmingly, only 20% of these children had a strong emotional connection with their mothers; 80% did not. Even more concerning is that, before the pandemic, only 40% of mothers with young children had a strong emotional connection; 60% did not. Think about that – 60% was already a crisis, and the pandemic made it so much worse.

You focus on the need for relational learning at school, and how not enough attention is given to teaching this. Do you see that shifting, and what do you think progress in this area would look like?

There are many promising experiments happening in early childhood settings, but I would love to see more schools intentionally focus on the importance of relationships. Most teachers enter the profession because they are deeply relational and passionate about building meaningful connections with their students. Yet our current systems often fail to prioritize relationships. For example, early childhood educators are often moved between classrooms early in their careers, disrupting the relationships they strive to build. They often leave the profession as a result. There are concrete steps we can take, such as dedicating more time to free play/recess, or guided play during class, setting relational goals, and starting each day with connection circles. These small but powerful changes can make a big difference in fostering meaningful relationships in early education.

Your chapter on robotic child care sounded like something out of a science fiction movie. How can we approach AI so that we aren’t relying on robots to care for kids but we are still open to learning about ways technology can make things easier?

The option of AI is everywhere; there is extremely rapid adoption. The impact on relationships and learning is really unclear on this point. We want to see technology and AI augment human relationships and not replace them.

Here is where I am concerned — what I call ‘junk tech’ is technology that is not good for us, not relational in nature. We should minimize that, like we do with junk food. We can have a little bit but not too much. But here is a problem I see as a parent and an educator: It is very difficult for any of us to find what is good or not good from a tech perspective. 

If you are looking at or trying to download an app for your child, it is very difficult to know whether it is relational or not. You have tools like that are trying to help, but I would like to see, like in food, that if you buy a bag of chips you can see the nutritional benefits. It doesn’t mean it will change your behavior, but at least you will have information. But for tech tools we don’t have that right now. It is an area I would love to see more progress being made. 

Pediatric surgeon Dr. Dana Suskind, who specializes in cochlear implants and has authored books on brain development and early childhood development, founded the research initiative that would evolve into the  in 2010 after observing the degree to which differences in her patients’ early language exposure led to inequalities in their ability to learn and thrive. These disparities often fell along socio-economic lines. Parents across the board want to help their children get the best possible start in life, Suskind knew, but she saw that they often lack basic knowledge about how to foster early learning. Envisioning a population-level shift in parents’ and caregivers’ knowledge and behavior, Suskind and her team created an asset-based, parent-centered curriculum — Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns — also known as the . 

The program has been in existence long enough now for researchers to study its long-term effectiveness. The conclusion? It works, and it keeps on working. 

When Parents Know More, They Do More

shows that frequent conversational exchanges with adult caregivers promotes children’s language and vocabulary skills, cognitive performance, brain function and even the . A  by researchers with the LENA Foundation (Language ENvironment Analysis), for example, confirmed that the number of two-way conversations with adults that babies experience in their first three years is related to their verbal abilities and IQ in . 

While all families communicate with their children, studies have shown that children in low-income families generally hear fewer words, shorter sentences and phrases, and are less likely to have books in their homes, setting up disparities that lead to later deficits in academic and social achievement. There’s a lack of consensus around this “word gap” though. Some researchers have  the validity of these findings, while  call for more exploration of them, but encourage the idea of supporting families with specialized programs to help their children develop early language skills — which is what Suskind and her team are doing.

The TMW Center has been focused on developing resources and programs to help parents and caregivers understand more about brain development — and the 3Ts have been core. There’s a 3T curriculum for families, a 3T curriculum centered on home visiting, and an online professional development course for educators who want to engage with families about the science of brain development, which are all free to use. 

These resources provide parents and adult caregivers evidence-based information about how their kids’ brains are developing, and the vital role caregivers play in their child’s cognitive and language development. 

The 3Ts Home Visiting (3Ts-HV) curriculum, for example, is a six-month program for caregivers of 13- to 16-month-old toddlers from low-income families that coaches parents in their homes through 12 tutoring modules. One module discusses executive function and presents strategies for using talk to regulate children’s behavior, particularly during tantrums — and offers guidance to help parents recognize their own emotions and tone of voice. Another addresses the difference between issuing directives versus using explanations to foster young children’s ability to think things through. (Think: “Don’t throw the football in the house because you might break something,” rather than “Don’t throw the #$%$# football in the house” — though the latter is a communication style to which any parent can relate.) Other modules discuss how caregivers can use encouragement, storytelling, numbers and patterns when engaging with babies and toddlers.

Through relatable videos (featuring beyond-adorable infants), parents learn that their young children’s brains are like sponges, soaking up words and ideas, then using them to make billions of neural connections. One lesson describes their verbal interactions like a piggy bank, with every word like a penny in their account. “The more you invest now, the richer they’ll be later.” Parents are encouraged to be in the moment with their child and to talk about what they’re focused on and to look for opportunities to talk and interact. The subtext: language learning isn’t something that exists in isolation, but rather it’s a part of daily life. Everything a child sees and hears shapes their experience, and caregivers are the facilitators who help make that happen.

Evaluating the 3Ts Curriculum

A 2018 study published in the evaluated the 3Ts-HV curriculum and found that caregivers who participated in the twice-monthly visits were significantly more knowledgeable about early childhood development and engaged more with their children in the conversational turn-taking that builds language. These caregivers praised and encouraged their children more, explained more, asked more open-ended questions, and used less critical language and physical control in their interactions with their children.

The initial study showed the effectiveness of the 3Ts-HV intervention in fostering changes in parents’ interactions with their children within six months of their participation. A recent  published in October in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics shows that the program not only improves children’s language learning in their toddler years, but offers sustained benefits to their vocabulary and literacy skills when they reach kindergarten and beyond.

According to Christy Leung, the TMW Center’s director of research who co-authored the most recent study with Suskind, this simple intervention with a group of families increased parental knowledge when the child was 26 months old, contributed to more frequent parent-child conversational turns at 38 months, and promoted children’s language skills at 50 months. The study provides empirical evidence that increasing parents’ knowledge and enriching parent-child linguistic interactions during their toddler years promotes language development at preschool age. Mothers who received the intervention continued to provide their young children with enriched language input without showing significant declines even after the intervention’s “honeymoon phase” ended, Leung says.

When designing the curriculum, Leung notes, “We wanted to emphasize that the parent is the best person to educate their small children. They struggled to realize that they are their child’s first teacher, and they don’t have to wait until their child goes to school [for them] to start learning.” 

One of the hardest things, Leung says, is to change parents’ minds about the idea that educational TV is better than they are at teaching their children, especially at an early age. They think they don’t have a good enough vocabulary or education to do so. 

Leung adds: “But we emphasized that they are exactly the best resource for their children, and they know their child best. Once they saw that their child learns best from a real person — and that they’re learning all the time, even if they may not be verbal yet — that was a big realization for them.”

Simply put: What parents know matters, and it shows up in their children’s learning readiness. 

Prevent, Don’t Remediate

Brain development research has shown that the first years of life are when the brain is growing and developing most rapidly and that the . Early deficits in language learning often accumulate and can affect the entire trajectory of a child’s life. We know this. But that knowledge doesn’t jibe with what the U.S. , to help develop those brains. 

Prevention, rather than remediation, is the battle cry for Suskind and her team at the TMW Center, who view parents as an untapped resource in this equation. Their studies point to a doable and easily replicated way of using the  to support families in building the healthy foundations for lifelong learning. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines the public health approach as one rooted in the scientific method that strives to provide the maximum benefit for the largest number of people.)

According to the TMW Center, 3Ts programs are on course to reach 15,000 families across the U.S. by the end of 2024. Communities and individuals can sign up on the  and receive free resources to implement the curriculum in their schools, museums, libraries, community centers and other organizations. 

“We’ve gotten such positive feedback from the parents, who say having this experience is unique and valuable,” Leung says. “We heard from our curriculum team that one of the moms receiving the intervention saw another mom in the laundromat and said, ‘This is something you really should sign up for. It changed my life.’”

“That touches us so much it brings us to tears,” she says. “It also gives us another idea for how we can spread the word.”

These moments of connection are sweet, emotional encounters, but researchers know they are much more. Research scientists at the University of Washington’s (I-LABS) recognize this “social ensemble” as the nascent that lay down the pathway to language — the gateway to connection, education and the world of ideas. Given that these distinctive interactions appear to be universal and uniquely human, I-LABS researchers wondered what their developmental purpose could be. What they found was not only that the babies’ brains “lit up” during these interactions, but that the degree to which individual babies responded to social interactions predicted the child’s language growth beyond 2-½ years of age.

“What we were trying to see is whether that social ensemble — the parentese, the warm smiles, the touches, and the back and forth that says you’re paying attention — has a (developmental) goal in addition to the emotion that’s connecting these two people,” says Dr. Patricia Kuhl, I-LABS’ co-director, and holder of the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning, who led a groundbreaking longitudinal study linking infants’ individual brain responses to social interactions and their future language development.

Using a magnetoencephalography () brain-imaging device — a safe, silent, noninvasive technique I-LABS has tailored for studying infants — the researchers monitored the brains of a group of 5-month-old infants during social and nonsocial interactions with an adult. The researchers then followed up with the children at 18, 21, 24, 27 and 30 months. Their findings were published in the April issue of and represent the first such study to track the relationship between infants’ social responses and their language acquisition.

Arriving Ready for Language

Even before they produce their first words, infants are learning phonetic sound patterns. They come into the world able to pick out the human sounds that make up words in any language. Previous independent studies have shown that there is a “sensitive period” for phonetic learning between 6 months and one year when these initial universal phonetic capacities narrow down and become specific to their native languages.

“Testing the babies at 5 months was important because we were trying to establish that this social connection that lights up the baby’s brain and gets them ready to learn comes first and sets them up for when this sensitive period begins,” says Kuhl, the study’s lead author. “The social interaction is of cognitive importance and gets the baby ready for what’s coming around six months. The exaggerated face and silly-sounding speech (the ‘ensemble’) come intuitively and are the original ‘hook’ that pulls them and primes them for the learning to come.”

For the study, Kuhl says, researchers set the infants up in the MEG device and an adult female researcher engaged with the baby, speaking in parentese and reacting warmly back and forth using the tried-and-true adult-baby call and response. For the experiment’s nonsocial control, the researcher would then turn and speak to another adult seated just out of the infant’s view. The intention was to capture typical social interactions that babies experience regularly in their home environments.

The researchers’ findings showed that at 5 months, face-to-face social verbal interaction between an infant and an adult who’s sensitive to the baby’s cues significantly increases the child’s brain activity in regions involved with attention, compared with a nonsocial control. Even more exciting to those interested in babies’ language learning, the scientists found that babies’ individual levels of brain activity during the social interactions showed a strong positive association with their subsequent language skills.

“Not all children’s brains lit up to the same degree to the social ensemble,” Kuhl says. “Their social attention is different. The ones with more social attention learned language faster.”

The Joy of Face-to-Face

Kuhl says the researchers knew from previous studies that social interaction — rather than, say, watching a video or app — is essential for language learning. The current study shows that parents’ natural use of parentese, coupled with smiles, touch and their warm volley and return captures infants’ attention at an early age and makes them ready to latch onto language when that sensitive window opens around 6 months.

The researchers didn’t use the children’s parents in this study because they were concerned their history of interaction might color the babies’ responses, nor did they have the researcher turn from the baby to use a smartphone or device because they have seen in other research how upsetting that is to the babies. The researcher interacting with the babies had not met them before the experiment began but started the kind of natural interaction with them that might occur in the grocery store or when other adults drop over for a visit. She cooed back and forth with the baby, then, on cue, looked away to interact with another researcher “offstage” for a moment. On another cue, she turned back to the baby and began the social interaction again.

The babies’ little brains loved all that attention and weren’t happy (as observed by MEG’s neural light show) when they were being ignored. Some babies’ brains really sparked at the social interaction and those were the babies who, by 2-½ years, showed the greater vocabularies and more sophisticated use of language.

This doesn’t mean that babies have to be attended to at all times or they’re going to lose out on language skills, Kuhl is clear to state. No helicopter parenting here!

“That would be the wrong message to take from this research,” she says. “Part of these interactions’ special nature is that they only come occasionally. The interaction is there, then it goes away, and next time it comes, it’s like Christmas — something to be anticipated and excited about. So, parents shouldn’t stress and think, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s one more thing I have to think to do.’ Its magic is that it’s unexpected and babies are overjoyed by that.”

More Questions, More Studies

As good studies do, this one has prompted almost as many questions as it’s answered. For one thing, researchers want to know about what’s happening with the brains of babies whose mothers are dealing with clinical depression.

“In mothers who have clinical depression, you don’t see the smiles, the parentese and the warm interactions,” Kuhl says. “There are all kinds of issues with these children, one of which is a depressed affect and a slow growth of language.”

The current study also points to a greater understanding of autism and draws attention to other research, such as that of Dr. Karen Pierce of t he University of California San Diego, et al, showing that babies’ reduced attention to parentese can both contribute to downstream language and social challenges, and help diagnose toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

“When (Pierce) tests young children who are at risk for autism (because they have a sibling with autism) with a social versus nonsocial stimulus — such as people interacting versus cars or just sound — the children with autism tend not to like social, people-oriented stuff,” Kuhl says. “And the more they tend not to, the more severe their clinical symptoms for autism are.”

Another fascinating study in the I-LABS pipeline is the differences between mothers and fathers in their deployment of parentese. Preliminary research indicates that men are talking to their babies only 25 percent of the time, compared with mothers. They do use the social ensemble to interact with babies, but ongoing research is looking at whether fathers stop using parentese earlier in the child’s development, and if they do, why that may be the case.

�³󲹳�’s that about? We’ll have to stay tuned.

Meanwhile, we can go ahead and indulge our impulse to engage in that silly social way with babies and know that we aren’t just forming emotional connections; we’re helping open their pathway to life with other humans.

“I suppose if you were on an island by yourself and had all the survival skills you needed to discover food, water and shelter, you might be able to survive as an isolate,” Kuhl says. “But everything we know about human beings is that we inherently crave connection with each other. And language is the gateway to any communicative connection we have. It’s our social-emotional glue.”

Picking out a baby toy – whether it’s for your own child or a friend’s kid or the child of a family member – can be overwhelming. Although Americans spend a year on baby toys, it’s difficult to know which toy will be fun, educational and developmentally appropriate. The options seem endless, with search results at common retail sites in the hundreds, if not thousands. Is price a reliable indicator of quality? Are technological enhancements useful?

Our – published in the American Journal of Play in April 2023 – surveyed the toy market for babies and toddlers age 0-2 at two major U.S. national retailers, with an eye toward differences between battery-powered toys, like the , and traditional toys, such as the .

We found significant differences between these two toy types in terms of how they’re marketed – with more traditional toys marketed as supporting physical development and more technological toys aimed at cognitive development. However, these companies do not always have researchers investigating whether the toys actually help children learn.

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As and , we offer five tips before you buy your next baby toy.

1. Consider your goal

When purchasing a toy, consider whether you have any particular developmental goal in mind. For instance, do you want your baby to develop fine motor skills by playing with a , or to by building a block tower?

2. Look for open-ended toys

Many parents and caregivers know that children often more than the toy inside it. One reason is that boxes are open-ended toys – they can become anything a young child dreams up. Conversely, a toy cellphone directs the type of play much more rigidly.

A good rule of thumb is to choose toys that require . For example, infants can explore a set of realistic miniature animals sensorially – usually by putting them in their mouths – and then later use them for pretend play, or even to create animal footprints in play dough. Contrast this experience with a large plastic elephant that needs to sit on the floor and lights up and makes elephant sounds. Here, a child is limited in play, with the goal being to make the object light up or play a sound.

3. Recognize gender biases

Several major retailers have over the past decade, opting for “kids” instead of “boys” and “girls.”

However, if you enter the store of one of those major toy retailers today, you will still find some aisles filled with pink toys and dolls, while other aisles feature monster trucks and primary-colored blocks. A toy sword might not be labeled as “for boys,” yet shoppers often perceive it that way based on . If you look only in certain aisles or at stereotypical toys, you might miss out on toys that your child would enjoy regardless of gender.

4. Be wary of marketing claims

The makers of tech toys often make claims about their educational potential that are not backed by science. For example, an electronic shape sorter might claim to help children develop emotional skills because the toy says “I love you!”

Be skeptical of such claims, and use your own experience and insights to evaluate the educational potential of a toy. You might read the retailer and manufacturer descriptions, but also see what the toy actually does. If it fosters caregiver-child interactions or helps to develop a specific skill – like how building blocks support spatial skills, and finger puppets build fine motor skills – then it is likely a toy worth considering.

5. Prioritize human interactions

Keep in mind that toys are not chiefly designed to create baby geniuses – they are meant to be fun! So think broadly about whether you want a new toy to support physical, social, emotional, cognitive or creative development while keeping it fun. And remember that no toy can replace between caregivers and children.

Research suggests that when playing with tech toys versus traditional toys with their children. So choosing traditional toys, such as nonelectronic shape sorters and building blocks, may be one way to foster the types of interactions that support healthy development.

Overall, research suggests that, in most cases, traditional toys provide than technological toys. When purchasing a toy, think through the experiences you want the baby in your life to have, think broadly about the goals of a particular toy, try to provide opportunities for and remember to have fun.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

With the state legislature approving $30 million in funding in April, TennCare will seek approval from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for the diaper benefit, which it hopes to receive in early January.

According to the (NDBN), one in three U.S. families is financially unable to provide all the diapers their children need, which exposes the child to potential health risks, makes it less likely for them to be accepted at child care where parents must bring diapers for each day, and increases the financial, physical and emotional stress on parents. The NDBN estimates that diapers for one Tennessee child for one month cost about $80, a crippling amount for struggling families — particularly those with two or more children.

Diapers are not covered by any federal assistance program, though they are a keystone for families’ health and financial well-being. For a parent or caregiver making minimum wage, roughly 8 percent of their income will go toward diapers. Most families who are challenged with diaper insecurity fall short by 20 diapers a month, a number that can make the difference between having a job and being unemployed.

A study by the noted an increase of $11 in personal income for every dollar’s worth of diaper aid that a family received, due to better health outcomes for babies and less time missed from parents’ work and school. It’s an investment that ultimately increases a state’s tax revenues as families’ financial picture stabilizes as they participate more fully in the workforce. The U.S. Health and Human Services’ , named unmet diaper need as a health equity issue. found that babies experienced 77 percent fewer days of diaper rash when funding for diapers and diapering supplies was provided.

In Tennessee, more than 300,000 of the state’s population are children under age 3 and about 49 percent live in families earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level (about $30,000 for a family of four). As part of its expanded services, TennCare will adjust its income threshold for pregnant women to 250 percent of the federal poverty level, making the program available to an additional 2,400 new mothers per year.

In addition to helping families afford diapers, TennCare’s additional benefits will establish continuous health coverage for children for at least their first year, regardless of changes in the parents’ circumstances or eligibility, helping an estimated 10,000 children remain enrolled. It will also make permanent Tennessee’s full year of postpartum coverage including dental and pharmacy benefits, which began as a pilot program in 2021, and will add lactation supports for enrollees.

“We’re able to provide all these benefits and add additional people to our TennCare program through a unique waiver that we negotiated with the federal government, TennCare III,” the program’s director, Stephen Smith said in a statement. “The concept of this waiver is that Tennessee is rewarded for its efficient management of our Medicaid program, and that reward comes in the form of shared savings. These are additional federal dollars that we can reinvest back into the program to enhance benefits and services, and serve more people to accomplish these important objectives.

“A real benefit of this approach,” Smith said, “is that we not only can provide more benefits and serve more Tennesseans, we can do it at no additional taxpayer expense.”

Medicaid waivers are vehicles that states can use to test new or existing ways to deliver and pay for health care services in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Tennessee is one of 10 states that has chosen not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, electing to receive federal funds via a modified block grant. Under the waiver agreement negotiated with the federal government, the state will retain half of any federal savings its Medicaid program achieves. Tennessee’s waiver was approved in January 2021 and is valid for 10 years.

Tennessee received $330 million of shared savings in its first full year of the waiver, says Amy Lawrence, TennCare’s director of communications, savings that will be turned back into the Medicaid program.

TennCare recipients will not be taxed for the diapers they receive, Lawrence says. Tennessee’s tax rate on diapers is 7 percent to 10 percent depending on the locality — one of the highest rates in the country. A bill to eliminate the tax on diapers, formula and baby wipes for all Tennesseans was introduced this year but failed to make it out of committee.

Michele Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center, said the diaper benefit is welcome as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The Nashville-based nonprofit advocates for Tennessee’s approximately 1.3 million low-income families through class-action lawsuits and works to shape public policy. Medicaid expansion has been one of the center’s key missions on behalf of the more than 300,000 uninsured Tennesseans.

“While we are grateful for any baby step towards a healthier state,” Johnson says, “the state’s investments in minor tweaks to the TennCare program are a far cry from meeting their moral responsibilities to the people who send them to Nashville to solve problems and lead.

“We continue to be at the bottom of the nation in most every metric of health and well-being due to leadership failures. We desperately need leaders willing to set aside politics and prioritize joining the rest of the industrialized world in choosing evidenced-based approaches to sound and equitable health policy.”

A spokesman for Tennessee’s House Democratic Caucus said that covering the cost of diapers and other provisions TennCare is promoting are necessary steps but, like Johnson, urged that Tennessee go farther.

“We know the need is there,” said Ken Jobe, press secretary for the caucus, in an email. “TennCare’s proposed funding numbers are encouraging. However, until the program is fully implemented, we will not know the full impact and actual number of families receiving these resources.

Myelin is the fatty insulation that protects axons, the transmission lines of the nervous system that shoot information-bearing electrical impulses to various parts of the body (which is a much-abbreviated explanation of a fantastically complex process). Myelin helps these electrical impulses to travel efficiently along the axon. This is critical for effectively transmitting information throughout the brain with exquisitely precise timing.

Babies are born with brains full of axons located right where they need to be for various functions, such as hearing, seeing and movement. White-matter pathways associated with language are also present at birth, but their myelin continues to develop for many years after birth. By examining myelin development, scientists have discovered that these neural connections don’t simply grow, they are cultivated by their environments.

Parental input has been considered a key environmental factor for infants’ language development, as shown by a wealth of behavioral research. But few studies have looked at how parents’ verbal interactions with babies affect the physical development of their brains. Given the critical growth in children’s language-related activities in their first two years of life, a better understanding of what’s going on in their brains at this time is badly needed.

Thanks to a long-term intervention study of infant language-learning, researchers at the University of Washington’s����(I-LABS) have a trove of -device home recordings of child vocalizations and parent-child verbal interactions taken at regular intervals throughout babies’ first 24 months.

For their recent study on the effect of language experience on white-matter development, researchers invited all the families back to the lab for an MRI session when the children were around 2 years old. The MRIs imaged the white matter in the toddlers’ dorsal language system, a brain network that is tied to expressive language development and long-term language ability. They found that the frequency of parents’ verbal interactions with their infants, specifically conversational turns, uniquely predicted myelin density in this system.

“Conversational turns” are the back and forth between adult and child that can occur even before the child has actual words, a call and response that speaks “connection” in every utterance. In their study described in a published March 1 in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers found that parent-infant conversational turns link to white-matter growth (myelination) at age 2 and suggest that early interactive language experiences uniquely contribute to brain development associated with long-term verbal and cognitive ability. The more back and forth between babies and parents, the greater the growth of the brain in areas critical to language ability and sensory-motor integration that affect the child’s ability to learn language and build vocabulary. These effects carry through early childhood and predict cognitive and linguistic ability into adolescence.

In other words, conversational turns are a very big deal, and MRIs show it.

Not Words Alone

I-LABS researcher Dr. Elizabeth Huber, the paper’s first author, says the studies establish that the growth in white matter isn’t related simply to the amount of language a child is exposed to — the number of words that wash over a child — but the amount of high-quality verbal interaction they have with the adults in their lives. The effects of these interactions were apparent as early as six months, when the child is not yet speaking but vocalizes (“babbling”) and the parent vocalizes back.

“Conversational experience as early as 6 months is predicting what the brain looks like at age 2 years,” Huber says. “It was striking to me how early and potentially long-lasting these effects are.”

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of those early years. White-matter pathways develop at their most dramatic rate during these years, though they continue to develop through adolescence. Language exposure during this window has been linked not only to vocabulary building but to multiple aspects of children’s cognitive development. Being exposed to conversational contingency — meaning interactions that acknowledge each other’s presence and take note of what’s happening in their shared physical environment (Do you see that kitty? How does a kitty go?) — encourages shared and sustained attention. If the adult is focusing on something and draws the child’s attention to it, the child is then able to focus on that thing distinct from everything else in the environment. Maybe not for long, but conversational contingency builds the muscle.

Conversational turns have been shown to stimulate more and higher-quality vocalizations from infants, including making sounds that are more consistent with the speech sounds and patterns of the adults around them (phonology). If you keep sharing conversational turns with your child in your Deep South accent, it’s a fair bet that their baby talk will have a drawl.

Through this conversational give and take, babies learn to listen and adjust their vocalizations in response to another person, a critical ability in all human interactions.

So Much More to Learn

Huber stresses that this research really has just begun. The current study was limited to native English speakers and families without known risk factors such as lower social economic status or a family history of dyslexia. The sample size was relatively small, and future work will look at larger and more diverse samples, including a larger control group of families that didn’t take part in an enriched language intervention.

“Right now, we’re really excited about the idea of adding brain scans with 6-month-old, or even younger, infants,” Huber says. “Can we already see these effects (on white matter) at a much younger age? Or is there something special about what’s happening in the brain around 2 years, as toddlers are starting to really use language to communicate in a more sophisticated way? Are there incremental changes in the white matter that connect to what an infant is currently experiencing, or do environmental effects show up at certain points in development more strongly than others? What we see right now is that conversational turns in infancy predict white-matter density in the 2-year-old, but that raises a lot of follow-up questions.”

Another area that’s ripe for research, Huber says, is looking at the effects of environmental factors such as poverty or trauma, which can interrupt the brain’s development, and potential ways to mitigate that interruption. The human brain is incredibly flexible, she says, and if there is some kind of a deficiency, researchers wonder if there are ways that deficiency can be mitigated.

It’s important to avoid thinking that all is lost if a child isn’t exposed to rich conversational interactions in their earliest years, Huber says. People working two jobs and giving their all to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table might not have as much time as they’d like to spend with their children.

“The rich early experience seems to be really important,” she says. “There are moments in development where we’re particularly sensitive to certain aspects of our environments, and where it’s easier to learn certain skills. So, for example, it’s harder to master a second language if you didn’t hear it or have some exposure as a very young child. I studied Spanish for years in college, but I speak it with a heavy Kansas accent, and I have to stop and search for words.

“At the same time, it isn’t as simple as saying, ‘If you have this amount or type of interaction at this exact age, you will excel in learning language, and otherwise you won’t.’ Children learn in different ways, and there is still lots of flexibility to learn and adapt, even later in life.

“Ultimately though,” Huber adds, “it’s exciting to me to think that we are starting to understand more about what matters for different aspects language development. If we can help parents and children so that a given child is coming into school on strong footing, that can make a difference for a child’s whole life going forward.”

“It’s hard for parents to know who to trust these days,” says Dr. Nia Heard-Garris, attending physician at the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “You google cold symptoms, and it’ll say that you have cancer. It can be hard to distinguish what information sources are legit and whether the sources you find know what they’re talking about.

“First-time parents are often so intimidated,” says Heard-Garris, who was one of the video series’ creators and part of a team of pediatricians, public health specialists, consultants and child development specialists who spent the much of the pandemic lockdown meticulously crafting the content for these seven minutes of reassurance. “Having a baby is a lot to go through. I can’t tell you the number of parents I’ve had in my office crying because they knew they couldn’t do it right.”

In any medical practice, time is of the essence, and in pediatric practice especially there’s a lot to pack in as the clock is ticking. Dr. Carrie Quinn, executive director of the Mount Sinai Parenting Center, says the challenges are twofold:��Providers don’t have enough time in primary care to deliver all the information parents need or want, and providers are trained with a focus on illness and treatment. Questions about parenting and how parenting behaviors can shape a child’s success in relationships and school can affect their mental health, and even physical health and well-being are not always a priority.

“The science is exploding in the area of early childhood development and how the first few years of life are so important in building a strong foundation for the future,” Quinn says.��“As health care professionals, we have an incredible opportunity as we are in front of parents from the moment they become a parent. And we have countless touchpoints with families in the months and years that follow. These are all opportunities for us to support parents, help them be the parent they want to be, and to give their child the best start in life.”

The Sparks video series accomplishes the feat of making certain the family’s medical needs and milestones are met during well-baby visits while also providing the all-important guidance parents seek.

Designed with Parents in Mind

With input the team solicited from experts across the country, the videos blend information on social, emotional and cognitive development with such topics as sleep, safety, nutrition and medical concerns. Parent focus groups guided the creators to design messages in the language and framing that would resonate best. Each video is available in Spanish and English, and the series features an important diversity of families and speakers.

“In selecting the parents to appear in the videos, [we sought] a wide variety,” says Kathy Kinsner, senior manager of parent resources at Zero to Three. “We have same-sex couples, older couples, people who are first-time parents, and a wide range of ethnicities. It’s not a scholarly lecture, but rather, normal parents asking normal things, showing that there’s not just one approach, but many paths to the same parenting goal.”

In accompanying the child’s progress at regular intervals, the videos help shape the mothers’ and fathers’ evolution into parenthood. Few people in our society have much experience with small children when they start their journey with a newborn, Kinsner says. Moms and dads transform in remarkable ways into this being called “a parent,” and the videos foster that process.

“Kids evolve day to day,” she says, “and just when you think you’ve mastered infancy, suddenly you have a toddler on your hands. And that evolution goes on for the next 18 years. So having the videos there, step by step, keeps delivering the message, ‘You can do this. You can do this.’”

The series also provides a welcome alternative to the way pediatric practices once approached advice on parenting. Whatever vestiges of “my way or the highway” might linger from a more hierarchical, paternalistic past are dispelled with Mount Sinai’s approach generally; this series embraces equity and trusts parents to know their own culture and mores.

“Too often in history, families have been told that there is one, defined ‘right way’ of being a parent. We say now that great parenting can look very different from family to family and from culture to culture,” says Rebecca Parlakian, senior director of programs at Zero to Three. “For instance, in the section on dual-language learning, families talk about how they approach introducing two languages to their children — in very different ways. We’ve worked to show that there are lots of healthy, loving approaches — healthy and loving being the secret sauce — to achieving the same goal.”

Just as recent science has demonstrated the powerful impact negative early experiences can have on children’s physical and emotional health, it has also shown that positive parenting can buffer these adverse events. A guiding principle at Mount Sinai Parenting Center is to maximize any opportunity to promote strong parent-child relationships during routine care, to fold coaching and information naturally into every occasion parents have to interact in a pediatric environment. (ELN recently wrote about Mount Sinai’s Parenting Center’s groundbreaking environmental transformation partnership with the Bezos Family Foundation, Vroom and Mind in the Making.) Its first major initiative, , was an online, self-directed curriculum for residents designed to model ways do just that. From an initial pilot with eight pediatric residencies in 2018, the curriculum has flourished to the degree that it is now used by 82 percent of pediatric residency training programs and 18 percent of family medical residency training programs in the U.S.

Building Residents’ Knowledge Base

The video series will also extend the parenting message to pediatric residents, many of whom have never been parents before.

“We see this as a really important tool for educating residents,” Parlakian says. “We intentionally elevated parents’ voices in these videos equivalently to those of the pediatricians’ voices because surveys of parents show that while they trust and appreciate information from professionals, they also put a lot of stock and trust in other parents.

“These parent voices and the tactical strategies we’re offering parents in these videos can spark learning in the residents as well,” she says. “Most pediatricians recognize that it’s essential to build relationships with parents, but sometimes it’s hard to know what to say and how to frame the issues in ways that will resonate with parents.”

User guides offer a set of discussion questions to help residents deepen their understanding and ability to apply the concepts to their work with families, with prompts including, “What struck you in the video? Are you seeing any of these things in your child?” as well as encouraging the residents to talk with the parent about their struggles and achievements.

The video series is flexible to any health care setting and will be offered free to anyone who is interested. Video is a familiar format that doesn’t require a particular literacy level, which makes the information widely accessible. Rather than hand a parent a three-page article on behavioral issues, for example, parents can watch videos of other parents discussing how they approached these challenges.

The user guides for providers offer various scenarios for how clinics can make use of the series. Pediatric practices can make it easy for parents to watch the videos — available via web, text or app — prior to their well-child visits, in the waiting room or while waiting in the exam room before a visit.

Having acquainted themselves with the videos can prepare the providers for any unanswered questions the parents have — or just normalize for them the fact that new parents have a lot of questions, and that any question is a good one.

One of the video series’ key purposes, says Dr. Lisa Satlin, chair of the pediatrics department at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, is to create partnership among the providers and parents, and to provide a real-life education for all parties.

“The ready access of information from professionals and other parents that the series provides promises to build the strong parent-child relationships critical for a��child’s physical, mental and emotional development,” she says.

The series saw a soft launch in the fall and will be widely released and promoted this spring. Dr. Heard-Garris predicts it will be a huge hit for providers, residents and especially for parents. ��

“Never in my years of working at any pediatric institution has there been such extensive guidance for parents on how to navigate these first five years of their child’s life.”

But the information is critical. A large body of research shows that the more parents know about typical child development and effective parenting, the better they interact with their children and provide them with stimulating environments. Parents with a better understanding of what to expect as their babies develop feel less stressed, more effective, and better about themselves and their infants.

By contrast, parents who don’t know what to expect are often impatient and intolerant of the baby’s actions, misinterpreting normal child development as bratty or malicious behavior, increasing the possibility that the child could be mistreated. Parental impatience and intolerance also directly affect infant attachment, which can lead to harsh, inconsistent, disengaged parenting and the cycle of issues that can arise from that.

Reich, a professor in the School of Education at the University of California-Irvine, researches the factors that influence parenting behavior and how those influences affect children’s development. While working on her doctorate at Vanderbilt University, she and a fellow in developmental pediatrics, Dr. Kim Worley, along with their advisor, Len Bickman, began looking at how the process of delivering parental education might be improved.

In 1994, the American Academy of Pediatrics created the — well-structured, evidence-based parent-education material intended to be delivered across 31 age-based visits. The guidance has been updated and revised over the years, most recently this year, to help health care professionals spread the word on child health and behavior to parents and caregivers. The information is there but getting it into the hands of parents is rarely as simple as it ought to be.

“Theoretically, well-child checkups should be a good time to educate parents about injury prevention, typical development and optimal parenting practice,” Reich says. “But there’s a lot of evidence that if physicians can spend any time covering parent education it tends to be a minute or less, and maybe covering three topics. When parents are interviewed later, even if the physician covered a lot of material, they don’t remember much of it.”

Sometimes the doctor’s office will give parents handouts based on the Bright Futures Guidelines, but often their literacy level is too high for many families. As the two researchers discussed alternative methods of spreading the word, they hit upon the idea of embedding the information in baby books — not books about babies a lá Drs. Spock and Brazelton — but books for babies. The books are written at a first-grade level, have pictures to supplement the text and will be read multiple times.

“If you’ve had a child, you know that you read the same books over and over and over,” Reich says. “We thought we could capitalize on this repetition.”

For the initial Baby Books Project (there are two so far), Reich and her colleagues at Vanderbilt created a three-group randomized study to compare the impact of educational books with noneducational books or no books at all. The researchers created a series of professionally illustrated board books targeted to different stages in babies’ development, with content addressing why babies might be behaving in a particular way, which parents might interpret as misbehavior, and how hitting won’t correct the behavior. The text also discussed tantrums and the value of praise, distraction and redirection when dealing with baby’s meltdown. The noneducational books feature the same illustrations, but without the informational approach. Both sets of books contained images of ethnically diverse families and were written in short, catchy, rhyming stanzas.

The books featured messages on the inside of each cover about self-care for the moms with such topics as managing stress, eating well and what to do when they’re feeling overwhelmed. The first project followed 145 low-income, first-time, predominately African American mothers in the southern US, from their last trimester of pregnancy until their child was 18 months old. In Baby Books 1, all books were delivered in person during home-based data-collecting visits.

Baby Books 2, which Reich developed in partnership with Dr. Natasha Cabrera at the University of Maryland, replicates and expands on the first project by including first-time mothers and fathers, and targeting co-parenting. Families in the study are low- to moderate income in Washington, D.C. and Southern California, and are racially and ethnically mixed. The books were written in both English and Spanish and the project was divided into four parts: families receiving books for mothers, books for fathers, books for both mothers and fathers, and noneducational books.

Thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health, the second study, which had been derailed by COVID-19 because researchers could no longer go to subjects’ homes, was expanded to 46 months and the books were mailed to families rather than requiring in-person visits. The results are now being evaluated but early analysis indicates many of the same positive results as Baby Books 1.

Based on assessments at all stages of data collection for Baby Books 1, mothers in the group receiving educational books increased their knowledge of child development and positive parenting practices, showed reduced support for spanking, increased efficacy and read more often to their children.

Children of the mothers receiving the educational books had fewer preventable injuries compared with the other groups. An analysis of medical chart audits of doctor office, emergency room visits and hospitalizations found that the impact of preventing injuries such as burns, cuts, falls and dropping showed that the educational book resulted in an overall estimated cost savings of $14,194 compared to the noneducational book group and $128,954 compared to the no-book group.

“The economist who did the analysis tried to calibrate the cost considering that when a child is injured, they have to be taken to the doctor and the parent has to miss work. There are costs around preventable injuries beyond the injury itself, and if the injury is significant, that can change the family’s quality of life.

“As we were hoping, the families did change some of their safety practices in the home,” Reich says. “If the action was putting away choke hazards or removing plastic bags or keeping dangerous things away from the kids, the moms changed those behaviors — mainly the practices that didn’t cost them money. If it meant installing smoke detectors or using baby gates, we didn’t see any changes because our families were very low income.”

The women’s feelings of stress and depression were measured at regular intervals throughout the project. At baseline — the women’s third trimester of pregnancy — the scores for depression hovered just below the criteria of clinical depression for all the women. Though those symptoms gradually decreased for all in the children’s first 18 months, the intervention group became less depressed faster than women in the comparison and control groups.

Where the needle didn’t move, Reich says, was the mothers’ practices around food. The first books included a lot of information about nutrition and breastfeeding.

“We had zero impact on any of that. The parents did better on demonstrating their knowledge, but they didn’t change their feeding practices whatsoever. That’s a common finding — food practices in families are a really hard thing to change. So, in the second baby books, we took all of that out because it was space in the books that wasn’t having an impact on behavior, so we moved in other information.

“We’ll see how that goes,” she says. “My hope is that with each study we’ll figure out what pieces are really amenable to change, and which aren’t and then really target those that are will have utility.”

Though the books are not available for distribution, the researchers hope that they eventually might be able to partner with a publisher to make the books widely available, for instance in Reach Out & Read programs in pediatric clinics or offered during Women, Infants and Children clinic visits. The books could also be made available through public libraries, preschools or bookstores.

“Maybe it could become like the TOMS shoes model where if someone buys a book, the publisher gives a free book away,” Reich says. “It’s such a low-cost, easy-to-disseminate, easy-to-implement intervention, I would love to see it expand.”  ​​​

“Once children start producing humor, they’re doing so every three hours,” says the survey’s co-lead author Dr. Elena Hoicka, associate professor at the University of Bristol’s School of Education. “And that’s a conservative estimate because the parents may have put their child to bed several hours before filling out the survey, or they might have missed an instance. So, it’s a pretty conservative measure. But it’s safe to say that kids are appreciating and producing humor really frequently.”

involved a 20-item questionnaire for parents about their children’s humor development from 1 to 47 months, such as whether they were playing peekaboo or laughing at their adults making funny faces. The survey pooled data from multiple studies involving families in the U.K., U.S., Canada and Australia to create a global taxonomy of humor development in the first four years. The researchers found that children in all locations were developing humor at the same rates and were responding to and creating the same sorts of humor, suggesting that humor is universal.

“The caveat is, of course, that these are all English-speaking countries,” Hoicka says. “One of my colleagues is now working on a Turkish version and it will be interesting to see if we’ll get the same results or if things look a bit different when we look at other countries. But across these English-speaking countries, we didn’t find differences related to income, gender, parents’ education level or other such factors.

“I would have thought that having an older sibling might increase a child’s humor, but we didn’t find that. Based on our data, it seems that children are developing humor at the same general rate, regardless of other children in the home.”

Hoicka says the researchers wanted to create this survey to establish when humor emerges and what sorts of humor children appreciate, and as a tool to see how development of humor relates to other stages in children’s development. Humor affects many other stages of life such as making friends, coping with stress and creativity. The intention is that systematically charting early humor development will be useful for other researchers who will be better able to target their future experiments and observations, as well as for parents and early childhood educators. Media professionals who are developing children’s programming can use the survey to target what kinds of humor will work at different ages.

The survey starts with babies at one month old, though Hoicka says it isn’t clear whether babies before three or four months really know what they’re doing. They do smile at their parents doing silly things like making funny faces or weird noises. In baby psychologist Dr. Caspar Addyman’s research on infant laughter, parents sent in videos of very young babies laughing, a few as early as one month.

“So, we decided to start our survey at that earliest age,” Hoicka says, “and though it’s rare, we do have some parents reporting humor appreciation and laughter at one month. But babies actually appreciating humor starts with, at best, three months and most are smiling and laughing at jokes (like peekaboo) at four months.”

Hoicka offers a word of caution in taking the timeline too much to heart. She doesn’t want parents thinking their child is a humorless dud just because they aren’t losing it at Daddy’s clowning by their fourth month. Children are born with different natures — some are naturally more somber; some seem to be born light-hearted. They’re going to respond to the world and the people around them on their own timelines. And sometimes Daddy’s clowning around just isn’t as funny as he thinks.

The development of humor is a complex process, and it understandably tracks with the child’s other developmental trajectories. For example, the first year is devoted to sensory development, so disruptions to the ordinary in what the baby hears and sees can be great material for eliciting a laugh. The element of surprise is important in humor of all sorts and equally so with babies. A sound they’ve never heard before can be startling but also hilarious. For example, entire YouTube channels are now devoted to babies cracking up over their parents tearing paper.

Humor and laughter are inherently social and, Hoicka says, can be a first step in parent-child communication. Babies at an early age don’t understand language, so clowning and playing provide some of the earliest opportunities to communicate and bond. Humor is also a place for children to practice creativity, because in making a joke or a funny face, the child is getting experience with the something-from-nothing that is the basis of any creative endeavor. Humans spend a lot of time in life trying to get it right; with a joke, the stakes are low and there’s no messing up — it’s just all part of the goofiness.

The call-and-response of humor is another way in which adults scaffold children’s development. The adult provides a cue, and the child responds to the cue; then the adult builds on that with another cue and, like conversational turn-taking, their information highway about the world is strengthened. They learn that when Mummy pretends to eat their toes that she’s really not the toe-eating sort and when Daddy pretends to sneeze a strand of spaghetti out of his nose, why, that’s just silly.

One-year-olds engage in tickling, chasing and funny bodily actions in tandem with their advances in motor development. As they grow older and begin to wrap their heads around language, the types of humor often shift to word-based jokes and riffs, which can be great practice for understanding fact and fiction and putting them to good advantage for a laugh.

“If you’re 4 and you know where the chocolate bar is but mum doesn’t, that can be leverage for a joke,” she says. But for the child to understand and deliver the joke, they must understand that they’re trying to get their audience to consider what’s true or not true at the same time to pull one over on mum. Pretty sophisticated thinking for one so young.

Children don’t really understand types of humor like knock-knock jokes and puns until they’re somewhat older — around 7, Hoicka says — but that doesn’t necessarily keep them from giving it a shot. “K�Դdz���-��Դdz���.” Who’s there?” “�ٴDz�!” isn’t exactly a knee-slapper, but it’s good practice as they sort not only what lands, but why.

For humor to be funny, it needs a positive environment, Hoicka says. Among many mammals, playfulness is used as animals are learning fighting or hunting, for instance, signaling that “Yes, we’re fighting, but let’s not actually hurt each other, shall we?” When “funny” gets too pushy or mean, it ceases to be funny and is read for what it is: aggression.

“Aggressive humor is not linked well to good mental health,” Hoicka says. “It’s linked to bullying and, although a lot of people seem to find it funny, it isn’t adaptive to human development in the way other types of humor are. Saying nonsense words is going to get you a lot more friends, for instance, than pushing someone even if you find that funny.

“We haven’t studied this as much as I’d like, but with aggressive humor, it looks as though not everyone gets there even by 47 months. Some kids maybe just aren’t as into it — that’s certainly what we see in older kids and adults. Some people just aren’t into meanness and aggressive humor.”

Beyond a certain age, Hoicka says, there’s a certain type of humor that rarely fails to land. She has a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old and says the richest vein of jokes for either is anything having to do with bodily functions and toilet humor, which a quick scan of some of the highest-grossing (pun intended) movies in the U.S. tells us never goes out of style.

“My daughter, the 3-year-old, has just discovered whispering,” Hoicka says. “She’ll call me over, ‘Come here, come here!’ and I just know what’s going to happen. I lean down and …”

Yep.

“Poo-poo,” she whispers, followed by delighted laughter.

Gets ‘em every time.

This dearth of dads in language learning needs to change, says Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramírez, director of the University of Washington’s Language Development and Processing Laboratory. But just knowing that things need to change doesn’t mean it will be easy.

Infant directed speech refers to the��high-pitched, singsong, slowed-down way adults talk to babies��that signals to them that “This conversation is for ��dz�.” Sometimes called “parentese,” it typically involves eye contact, interactive play and shared attention. Researchers agree that children’s language development is a social process; it takes place within the web of relationships and interactions that make up the child’s daily experience. Adults talking specifically to babies in this context communicate affect — how they turn their heads, widen their eyes, smile, wait for a response — and engage the infant’s attention, facilitating both social interaction and language learning.

Though research over several decades has focused largely on the contributions of mothers, a quick scan of family dynamics in the U.S. makes it clear that there’s more to the story. Women’s careers have expanded, and fathers have become more directly involved in their babies’ upbringing. With the pandemic, those demographic changes that were accelerated in many families, profoundly shifted mothers’ and fathers’ interactions within the family structure.

“In many families, due to the pandemic, dad’s job ended up being more flexible than mom’s, or for whatever reason (sometimes COVID-induced unemployment), fathers were home, in some cases more than mothers,” says Ferjan Ramírez. “For some families, that was a huge shift. Not for everybody, certainly, because we know women have been affected by the pandemic too. But in many families, there was a dramatic shift in the types of child care responsibilities that dads took on.”

It was an adjustment for families, she says, but also for researchers who had been asking mothers almost exclusively to bring children into their lab appointments.

“If the dads are going to bring the children in,” she says, “maybe we need to rethink the types of activities we’re asking parents to do with children when we’re studying them in the lab. Maybe we shouldn’t ask everyone to sit on the floor and read a book but should include some things the dads like to do. Why not study their language interaction during rough and tumble play or soccer, for example? Nobody has done that in the past, but we should because we really don’t know what happens.”

Fathers Have Their Own Way with Words

Including fathers in the research is essential not only because they are central to children’s web of social relationships, but also because fathers bring unique characteristics to IDS. Studies have observed that fathers use a higher number of rare words and fewer common words than mothers. Though fathers typically use fewer words with their infants, their speech is more diverse and more challenging to the child. Recent studies have found that fathers used significantly more wh-words (why? what?), asked more questions and asked for clarification more often than mothers. Posing wh-questions elicits a verbal response from the child which researchers believe helps foster their reasoning abilities in addition to building vocabulary.

Other studies have found that fathers’ use of such diverse speech was a unique predictor of their children’s overall language at 24 months and one study observed that in an economically and culturally diverse sample of families with children from 6 to 36 months, fathers’ use of wh-questions during book reading was significantly associated with children’s vocabulary when they entered kindergarten.

None of this is to say that fathers’ IDS is superior to that of mothers, but that their approach to their infants’ language learning matters and ought to be considered in the research. That may sound like a foregone conclusion, but as Ramírez points out, it’s complicated, starting with LENA (Language Environment Analysis), the recording device that captures and analyzes conversations between babies and their caregivers. Analyzing recordings from children’s ordinary interactions with all the caregivers in their lives, LENA’s software analyzes the number of words spoken by women and those spoken by men. One large study reported that mothers accounted for 75% of adult words spoken around children from 2 to 48 months. However, follow-up research assessing LENA’s reliability found that when male speakers used a higher pitch to address their infants, they were more likely to be wrongly tagged as female.

Because multiple studies have noted this error, researchers looking to distinguish mothers’ and fathers’ speech are encouraged to supplement LENA with manual annotations — a process Ramírez points out is slow, labor-intensive and expensive.

When researchers did make this adjustment, they found that mothers still verbally interact with their babies up to two times more than fathers do — a gap that’s especially pronounced in the baby’s first six months — but not 75% as previously reported. Researchers also found that when fathers interact one-on-one with their infants, they engage in equal amounts of IDS as mothers, but when mother comes into the picture, fathers speak significantly less. Some researchers propose that mothers act as “gatekeepers” and automatically assume the more active role with their babies or that fathers feel less responsible for holding up their end of the conversation when mom is present. Either way, the more accurate measurement of of IDS fathers’ engagement underscores that infants learn language within a social construct, and scientific research into parents’ effect on language development needs to acknowledge these complexities, Ramírez says.

“If you understand that mom takes over the conversation when she’s around,” she says, “it will be important in research to make sure we sometimes study dads without mothers present, as well as studying the triadic interactions of mother, father, child.”

New Approaches Needed

If fathers are to be included in language-learning research, she says, studies must be set up differently. In North America, where paternity leave is still an outlier, fathers may not be as free to come to the lab during weekday daytime hours, so labs will need to extend their hours to accommodate their different schedules. Labs also need to consider fathers’ different behavioral styles, she says. Studies have shown that fathers tend to engage in more energetic, playful, stimulating physical interactions with their children than the mother’s “smoother,” more flowing interaction.

“My husband would prefer to bounce a ball with our kids, while I might prefer to read,” Ramírez says. “That’s not a bad thing, it’s just different styles. But what that means is that it’s not as simple as, ‘Hey, let’s invite the dads to the labs.’ We really have to rethink how we’re going to do this so dads feel welcome and valued. This means developing new protocols, which shouldn’t be based on maternal templates alone.

“But to develop a protocol for studying language during soccer play, for example, requires extra resources and additional funding, in addition to first having to convince the funders that it’s necessary from a scientific perspective.”

Ramírez has firsthand knowledge of what an uphill battle that’s likely to be. When she sent out her on fathers’ IDS and its influence on language development for peer review, one reviewer’s comments were, “Why do you care about this? Is studying dads really going to make the needle budge? Why are you even writing this paper?”

“They eventually reconsidered, and the paper got published,” she said with a laugh. “But comments like this demonstrate that including fathers in research is still not a given in academia.”

Given the dramatic difference fathers’ infant-centered speech can make in the child’s vocabulary building and cognitive development, research must do better if it’s to adequately reflect contemporary language learning. Further study might reveal significant differences in paternal IDS that current research has not discovered and could lead to coaching sessions and interventions much more finely tuned to how fathers actually interact with their children.

This dearth of research is even truer of families headed by LGBTQ parents and same-sex couples, who are under-represented practically to the point of invisibility in the research. Ramírez’ will soon launch a study on infant language development in same-sex families, using LENA recordings and eye-tracking to analyze the preference for male vs. female parentese.

“Future research might consider parent gender as fluid rather than binary,” Ferjan Ramírez says, “and that’s going to require different strategies, more resources and a different approach to recruit and welcome parents to the lab. But until that’s done, we really can’t claim to fully understand the role of parents in children’s language learning.”

Toddlers are undeniably me-centric, but according to researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS), babies’ “selfishness” is only part of the story. Toddlers can override their own possessiveness to help others and share their treasured items — even snacks when they’re hungry — in a way the researchers say is unique to the human species. The Lone Ranger wouldn’t have lasted long in humanity’s long evolutionary journey: Cooperation and altruism are intrinsic to the human story and, says I-LABS researcher Dr. Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, these behaviors start early.

In studies involving nearly 200 19-month-old infants, researchers Barragan and I-LABS co-director Dr. Andrew Meltzoff showed the toddlers a delicious snack or one of their favorite toys. The experimenter stood behind a table and, in the control group, “accidentally” dropped the item without any reaction onto a tray beside the toddler. The babies in this group grabbed their item or their snack and made no attempt to share. In the experimental group, the experimenter reached for the item, indicating that they had dropped it and gesturing to have the object back. Though there was no verbal prompt or instruction, the babies saw the experimenter reach for the object, which Barragan says seemed to trigger the child’s instinct to help.

“I was struck by how quickly they helped,” he says. “In the first study, a majority of the babies — 58% — quickly gave the fruit to the experimenter when they reached for it. In a second study, we tested the babies at snack time when the infants were hungry and really wanted those blueberries and bananas, that number dropped to 38%. But that’s still a large number of infants willing to give up something that was highly valuable to them and share it with a stranger.” The researchers said the many of the toddlers looked longingly at their snack but still were willing to share it when the researcher indicated he needed it. You can see a brief video of the experiment .

In a follow-up study, parents brought in the baby’s favorite toy or sippy cup and the accidental drop again triggered no inclination to share. But when the experimenter reached for the item, around 40% of the babies quickly volunteered to give it up. Even with items the children slept with and were deeply attached to — such as their blankets or stuffed animals — they still quickly shared 30% of the time with no cue other than the experimenter indicating that they had dropped the item and would like it back. Children in the studies “helped” the researcher as readily in the first trial as in subsequent tests, indicating that they didn’t have to learn to help but did so spontaneously and freely.

In comparing their studies with similar research related to non-human primates, scientists have found that apes and chimpanzees will cooperate and share resources under certain conditions, but they don’t actively hand over delicious food that they need for themselves. That’s a uniquely human form of altruistic sharing that starts not long after language itself.

Though the studies were not looking at what accounts for differences in the individual toddlers’ behavior, two fascinating variables cropped up, Barragan says. The researchers found that toddlers with siblings and those from Asian or Latinx households were especially likely to help the experimenter.

“There have been some previous studies showing that if you have a sibling, you’re more oriented toward sharing,” he says. “We found that babies with siblings were roughly 9 times more likely to help. Developmental psychologists have discussed this being the case because children with siblings just have more social experience than single children.

“Hispanic and Asian children were significantly more inclined to help, and this was really striking,” he says. “Children of these backgrounds were around 23% more likely to help than children not from those ethnic/cultural backgrounds. We believe this is partly because, in those culture, parents may put more emphasis on ‘interdependence,’ which means more inclination to teach children to relate to others in a responsive way.”

In both Asian and Latinx cultures, families emphasize cooperation and��collaboration, he says. The Hispanic value of ser acomedido — to be accommodating, to attend to others — enshrines this cultural emphasis on being considerate.

“We believe that what is happening in the case of infants with siblings and those of Asian and Latino households is that already by 19 months, they have had enough observational and even personal experience that includes the norms of this behavior,” Barragan says. “They bring it to the lab with them.

“We’re not saying that children from any particular culture are more generous for any biological reason,” he says. “We’re emphasizing that cultures have different child-rearing practices and different ways to behave with each other and the children are seeing that. They brought that learned experience into the lab and that informed how they behaved with a stranger.”

Barragan says researchers aren’t sure what effect the pandemic will have on infants’ altruistic behavior when they haven’t been able to interact with other children and haven’t had the exposure to sharing behavior that children experience in childcare or preschool settings. The pandemic has also led to children having significantly less exposure to faces, which for millions of years have provided humans with key social cues. Whether all these circumstances will have a lasting effect and what, if any, the effects might be are unknowns at this point.

“The data is not out yet,” he says, “and it will be a while before we know. But I think what we will see in a few years — maybe decades — will be a ‘cohort effect’ in people who were young children during this time. The social structure has changed, family structures have changed, and families now are just going through so much. I’m sure we’ll see some changes, but I hesitate to speculate too much.”

Whatever the impacts might be, Barragan says he’s confident that interventions can be designed to strengthen children’s pro-social, generous tendencies. After all, humans have been at the business of sharing for a very long time.

Turns out, that’s not necessarily so. According to a recent study, Latinx fathers actually do speak to their infants in “parentese,” that unique style of speech known and loved by babies everywhere. And that’s a very good thing, says Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramírez, assistant professor in Linguistics at the University of Washington, because such speech supports the babies’ language learning and brain building. Mostly, dads don’t know that.

The importance of speaking with infants in this special way is backed up by a large body of research showing how much impact caregivers’ social interactions have on babies’ cognitive and linguistic development. In speaking ��— pitching their voices higher, slowing their speech and exaggerating their intonation — caregivers emphasize language for babies in a way that tells them, “This is for you, I’m speaking to you,” and elicit the kind of call-and-response “”feedback loop that’s the keystone to the child’s language development.

Recent studies highlight the important role fathers play in their infants’ language learning, but Ramírez has observed a persistent gap in the literature concerning the contributions of mothers and fathers. That gap is especially notable, she says, when it comes to infants of bilingual and culturally diverse background, such as Latinx babies.

In what Ramírez and her fellow researchers believe is the first study comparing the amount of mother and father parentese in a bilingual context, 37 families with bilingual, Latinx infants were set up with special Language Environment Analysis () recording devices. Often referred to as a “talk pedometer,” the LENA recording device captures and analyzes the back-and-forth talk among children and their caregivers, without identifying individual words.

Researchers asked the parents to put the devices on their babies on a typical weekend when both parents were home and not working. The device then “listened to” and analyzed when language was directed at the child and by whom. Prior to the listening sessions, the researchers surveyed the fathers about how often they performed specific parental responsibilities, such as changing diapers and singing to their children, plus additional questions on language development.

Once the LENA recordings had been analyzed, the results were unequivocal: Every father spoke parentese. Both mothers and fathers spoke directly to the children in Spanish and English; language-mixing was common in both, and all the fathers engaged in the parentese that elicited turn-taking and infant responses.

“I’m impressed that every single dad in the study used parentese,” says Ramírez. “This is something we’ve seen in non-Latinx dads and now we’ve observed it in our study of Latinx dads too. The proportion of how much they use parentese varies from family to family, but they all use it.”

Ramírez, lead author on the article, “,” which details this research, has investigated infant language-acquisition for years and has become acutely aware that most research thus far has focused exclusively on mothers. Traditionally, fathers have been considered “secondary caregivers” who were less involved in childrearing and often not on the research radar. But the world is changing in countless ways and two of those ways that Ramírez has her eye on are the increasing involvement of fathers with their children and the demographic shifts in the U.S. which predict that Latinx families will account for more than 30% of the population by 2050.

“In some states, like California, more than 50% of the kindergarten classes within the next 10 years is going to be of Latinx descent,” she says. “So, we need to expand our understanding of bilingual language acquisition, and we need to develop a better knowledge of the social differences with Latinx families — if there are stricter gender roles or different attitudes toward the role of father, for example — so that whatever interventions we design are culturally informed and sensitive.”

“Also,” she says with a laugh, “I have a personal connection to this situation. My husband is Dominican, and I’ve been observing Latinx families from the ‘inside’ for years.”

One of her primary observations is that two important cultural beliefs in Latinx culture — machismo and familismo — are at odds with each other, particularly when it comes to men’s interactions with their children. Machismo is the cultural view that values strict gender roles and defines men as being strong, masculine and dominant, encouraging an authoritarian style of parenting and less direct involvement with their babies. Many scholars and members of the Latinx community suggest that this portrayal of Latinx fathers is outdated and inaccurate, but it does persist — even in the way men sometimes view themselves. However, as Ramírez has observed personally and in her research, machismo is trumped again and again by the more-abiding value of familismo, the commitment to family as a source of loyalty, closeness, connection and strength.

“So, the main message we got from our study is that, yes, these dads are very much involved in and part of their babies’ lives,” she says, “and they adjust their speech in their interactions with their infants.”

One remarkable, though maybe not completely surprising, aspect of this and other studies of fathers’ interaction with their infants is the ratio of speech babies hear from their mothers compared to their fathers. On average, babies hear two to three times more child-directed speech (meaning language directed to the baby rather than just overheard) from women than from men. In this study, Ramírez, et al, discovered that infants heard on average 18,545 adult words per day: 11,954 from women and 6,591 from men, or an average of 50.4% fewer words from men. Fathers produced on average 43% less parentese than mothers, and the higher the family’s income, the more parentese both parents used. The biggest gap between the amount of language babies hear from mothers and fathers is when the infant is the youngest.

“We’re not 100% sure why that is,” she says. “It may have to do with just the behavioral differences between moms and dads, where dads tend to be more energetic and playful and prefer physical activities little babies can’t engage in yet. There’s also a whole literature on the hormonal differences that exist between moms and dads at this age, so there might also be a biological reason for this. Knowing that is really meaningful for me because if I design an intervention, I will want engage fathers when the babies are really little.”

The study also found that infants whose fathers who were more involved in child care responsibilities tended to hear more daddy-talk, though not necessarily more parentese, with one exception: Researchers saw a strong relationship between fathers’ use of parentese and their awareness of its importance. The more they know about the difference it makes, the more fathers use infant-directed speech. This positive relationship between use of child-directed speech and the parent’s knowledge, beliefs and attitudes around child development has been well-documented in English-speaking mothers, but Ramírez and her fellow researchers say theirs is the first study they’re aware of that demonstrates such an association in fathers.

“This is something I experienced over and over again when I spoke with parents (not just in this study),” she says. “The dads will say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s how my wife talks, and I don’t know why. It’s annoying. I’m going to talk to my baby like they’re a grownup because I want them to learn language. Then, when you record them, there it is: Parentese.

“When you explain to them what ‘turn-taking’ means and how much it matters to their child’s development, they’ll say, ‘Oh. OK, I think I can do this.’ And then we say, ‘Here’s the recording: You already do. Now let’s think of additional day-to-day situations and routines where you may not yet use it, but you could.’”

Understanding these dynamics matters to linguistics scholars like Ramírez because the knowledge will help shape the type of parent coaching interventions that she creates for her own lab, the Language Development and Processing (LDP) Lab, and the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS), both at the University of Washington. As the demographic shifts now at play in U.S. society continue their seismic activity, fathers increasingly will be viewed not as secondary caregivers, but as parents — and fluent fatherly parentese will be an increasingly important part of infants’ learning and language landscape.

Naja Ferjan Ramírez is a distinguished professor with the University of Washington’s Language Acquisition and Multilingualism Endowment, which provided funding for the study.

Although it’s been a while for anyone reading this article, try to imagine all that it takes to go from being an infant lying on a blanket to being a little human who can flip over, rock back and forth, engage your core, take off and crawl to that dog bowl that’s just out of reach. Then to pull up, stand and finally take those first wobbly steps? What an astonishing achievement.

Those first steps are more often the side-to-side lurch best known to drunken sailors and adults navigating icy patches, but with practice, babies’ movement becomes more efficient and coordinated. They’re able to cover some ground; over time, they learn to navigate their environment in ways mere crawlers could never imagine. Today the dog dish, tomorrow the world!

Though a long-standing body of research and caregivers’ empirical observation shows that infants’ walking skill improves with time spent walking, researchers with New York University’s wanted to learn more about the factors that influence the development of walking skill.

They found that, even though the amount of time elapsed since a baby begins walking is a strong predictor of their skill at walking, other factors also affect how quickly infants progress in their mastery. One of the more eye-opening findings is the difference made by the amount of space a baby has for practice.

Imagine trying to learn complicated dance moves on a disco floor crowded with revelers and you’ll get some sense of the challenges for a baby staggering into their first attempts to get from Point A to B.

“If an infant learning to walk doesn’t have the physical space to practice, whether it’s a crowded home or their day care, that can affect how quickly they develop their walking skills,” says New York University doctoral candidate Christina Hospodar, lead author of “Practice and Proficiency: Factors that Facilitate Infant Walking Skill.” “Of the factors we tested, it was one of the most robust and relevant factors contributing to an infant’s walking skill.” Adjusting for all other factors, more crowded homes predicted shorter steps and wider step widths — which indicate less mature walking. More space meant the longer, narrower steps associated with being an experienced walker.

The study compared two different groups of infants from the greater New York City area. All the infants were healthy and born at term with roughly half born at Langone Health Center and half at Bellevue Hospital. Babies in the study were from 13 to 19 months old.

Caregivers brought their infants to the lab where they played for 20 minutes, then walked on a sensor-rich, pressure-sensitive that allowed researchers to track the timing and location of their steps. Step width, length and speed are traditional indicators of walking skill, Hospodar says, so these were measured along with the percentage of the session the infant spent walking, how many steps they took per walking minute, and the percentage of walking bouts that were 3 steps or less. Along with these data and basic demographic information, including the number of rooms in their homes and the number of adults and children living there, parents reported when their baby had started walking. Walking onset was defined as the first day caregivers saw their babies walk three meters across a room without holding onto anything, stopping or falling.

In what they believe is the first study to locate any factor aside from months walking that strongly predicts walking skill, the researchers found that each additional person per room decreased the baby’s walking skill by approximately one month of walking. Co-authors of the paper are post-doctoral fellow Justine E. Hoch, Do Kyeong Lee, Patrick E. Shrout and Dr. Karen E. Adolph, NYU’s Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science. The researchers measured children’s race, ethnicity, the family’s primary language and caregivers’ education, but these sociodemographic factors didn’t hold statistical value, Hospodar says.

Ultimately, crowded environments had more bearing than other factors in the babies’ development of walking skills. The U.S. Census classifies homes as “crowded” if they contain more than one person per room. By that definition, she says, all the homes of Bellevue infants and half of the Langone infants would be classified as crowded. Previous studies found a reduction in gross motor skills among infants in crowded homes. In a different research group’s study of infant activity recruited from the same population as the Bellevue sample, only half of mothers gave their infants daily “tummy time,” essential to strengthening the child’s core muscles (again with the core!), only 34% placed their pre-walking babies on the floor and 57% reported that their babies were constrained for more than one hour a day, spending their time in equipment such as high chairs, car seats and playpens. Nearly half reported they were concerned about giving their babies unrestrained access to the floor because they feared possible injury due to the presence of other children, pets or vermin. That reluctance, Hospodar says, may be a logical explanation for why the Bellevue babies in the recent study would have a later onset age for walking.

Even within the parameters of living space, she says, individual babies respond to the challenge of walking in different ways; some choose to really go for it while others hang back. The researchers found that the babies’ weight and height did not predict their walking skill, though some studies have found that heavier babies tend to crawl and walk somewhat later than others. In other studies, factors such as race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status have been found to affect infants’ age to start walking because they’re associated with caregiving practices, such as keeping babies cradle-bound for most of their early infancy. In cultures that endorse rigorous handling and deliberate exercise, babies begin walking several weeks to months earlier than cultures without such practices, researchers say.

The transition from crawling to walking allows the infant to go farther, faster and expands their vantage point from the floor below them to the room around them, which provides endless opportunities to play and learn. The good news is that babies who’ve gotten a later start tend to catch up, though Hospodar says the research on long-term consequences is limited.

“Parents really shouldn’t get hung up on the exact age their babies start walking,” she says. “In terms of U.S. norms, typically if a baby isn’t walking by 16 months the pediatrician would be on alert — and that might just mean they need some physical therapy or early intervention services. The fact that a baby is late to start walking doesn’t necessarily mean they’re disadvantaged. There may be other factors that we didn’t study or measure, and there will always be trade-offs.

“If an infant isn’t walking yet,” she says, “maybe they’re working on other developmental skills and may be more cognitively developed than younger infants.”

Whenever they get started, once babies have the distinction of “walking,” they’re off to the races. Just make sure they have some room to roam.

“Babies have physics on their side,” researcher Danyang Han says with a laugh. Han’s recent paper, “,” coauthored with Dr. Karen Adolph, looks at the role of babies’ missteps as they learn to walk. The researchers hypothesized that understanding babies’ falling could provide a window into the role that errors play in how babies acquire basic skills — useful information not only for researchers wanting to know more about babies, but for scientists and engineers looking for the best way to approach machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“Babies natural way of falling protects them from serious injuries. Their bodies are close to the ground; they’re moving slowly and they’re very light weight,” Han says. “So, they don’t hit the ground very hard — and when they do, their bodies are 30% baby fat, and their bones are really strong. If an adult had 30% body fat, that would be obesity, but for babies, that’s padding.”

Like junior judo masters, babies naturally engage in the art of ukemi, breaking falls by absorbing the impact throughout the body. Babies automatically engage in a suite of reactive behaviors when they begin to fall — taking small steps to regain balance, grabbing for any nearby support to slow down the speed of the fall, bending their knees and reaching out with their hands to break the fall or landing on their bottoms if they’re falling backward. Nobody teaches them this and they don’t have to think about it. When they first start walking, and therefore falling, that knowledge is instantly present.

The same physics that render babies’ falls inconsequential are precisely those that can make falls so devastating for older people who take a spill. Elderly people are not so low to the ground; they have greater body mass, their bones are brittle and when they reach out to break their fall, it’s frequently their wrists or hips that break instead.

In fact, it was a fellow researcher’s documentation of elderly people’s falls that led Adolph to consider much more detailed data on infants’ falling. NYU’s Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, Adolph has studied infants’ movement for 30 years. She had always made note of falls as part of her apparatus and walking studies. When Canadian researcher Dr. Stephen Robinovitch, a world expert on falls among the elderly, spent a sabbatical in her lab and she saw the massive amount of data he had collected from falls in hundreds of older people in nursing homes, she realized that she already had a trove of data that could be analyzed to deepen researchers’ understanding of babies’ falls.

Deploying the tools of NYU’s high-tech Infant Action Lab, Adolph began to take a deeper dive into every aspect of infants’ falling. For the study for that formed the basis for Han and Adolph’s “Fall Like a Baby” paper, 138 families recruited from the New York City area brought their walking infants aged 13, 15 and 19 months to the lab, where they were observed for 20 minutes of spontaneous activity in a large playroom. (Details of the study can be found in Han’s and Adolph’s , which is available to the public.) None of the falls in the laboratory resulted in injury and severity was gauged by whether infants fussed, whether caregivers showed concern, and how long it took infants to recover and return to play. Researchers recorded 563 spontaneous falls during the course of the study. The babies fussed only 4.26% of the time, and caregivers expressed concern in only 7.64% of the babies falls.

“A lot of the parents’ language was about encouragement,” Han says. “’You’re fine. It’s fine. There’s a ball, can you go get the ball?’ And a lot of it was advice, ‘Oops. You fell. You gotta be careful with those stairs, love.’ But mostly, the babies just fell and got back up again.”

An undeniably adorable of this persistence can be found in the study’s video, “15 Falls with the Stroller,” which can be viewed on the NYU Databrary site. In it, a toddler is pushing a pink doll stroller. She falls, she gets up, she falls, she gets up, she falls, she gets up — 15 times in 20 minutes. Even when she falls and bumps her head, she fusses briefly, is comforted by her mom and then within seconds, enough of that and she’s back to that pink stroller. This little person is totally goal oriented and in it for the locomotion.

And mostly, that’s how falling is for babies. It’s trivial.

However, Adolph stresses, falling itself isn’t trivial for babies. In fact, it’s a leading cause of accidental injury and death in little babies.

“That’s why you have to keep your windows shut and block the stairs when they’re learning to crawl and walk,” she says. “They don’t understand what a bad fall can be.”

What babies don’t do is stop and consider that they just fell and maybe they’d better not try that again. Because the consequence of their falls is no big deal, they don’t even pause. Even babies whose parents reported significant falls before the study showed no inhibition about just going for it — toddle, toddle, tumble, toddle. Language learning in infants is the same process, Adolph says. Making “mistakes” while they’re learning to talk doesn’t even slow them down, as anyone within earshot of a babbling 1-year-old can attest.

Based on their research, Han and Adolph assert that babies learn basic skills like walking and talking by relying primarily on positive feedback when they accomplish their goals and discounting errors so that mistakes barely figure into the equation. What they don’t say is that all learning takes place this way. As we get older and our body of knowledge and needed skills become more complex and challenging, our errors are more costly and have more impact. “Oh well,” is not an adequate response to mistakes made learning to drive a car or climb a mountain.

But from a systems standpoint, the model of baby learning might offer an alternative to the reinforcement learning model for decision-making, which Microsoft describes, in part, as “algorithms and systems for technology that learns from its own successes (and failures).” If machine learning were to follow a model truly patterned after human learning, the model would be heavily weighted toward positive rewards and negative feedback would be inconsequential. Researchers in Adolph’s lab have run such a study with simulated robots and found that with machine learning as with infant learning, no penalty for mistakes is the best approach for getting flexible, generative learning and building more capacity to transfer learning to new situations.

The NYU researchers are now collaborating with a group of computer scientists and robotics engineers at Oregon State University on a project inspired by their work on infant falling. The reinforcement learning model that penalizes errors is ubiquitous in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), so the no-harm, no-foul model of the Infant Action Lab researchers might encounter resistance. But one of these days, who knows? Maybe robots and AI of the future will learn to fail like a baby.

The capacity to synchronize movement with another human is central to social interaction. When children jump rope, when one player passes and the other blocks, or when partners grab hands for the next round of West Coast swing, all those actions involve the ability to move in relation to one another.

Scientists have studied this “behavioral synchrony” primarily during stationary, face-to-face interactions between infants and adults, observing the matchup between facial expressions and vocalizations that make up the social dance between baby and caregiver. Drs. Justine Hoch and Ori Ossmy, postdoctoral fellows with New York University’s department of psychology, and Dr. Karen E. Adoph, NYU professor of psychology and neural science, wondered if that dance continues once the infants have begun to find their own way around the dance floor.

To find out, they set up a large playroom in their laboratory outfitted with toys, risers, slides with stairs and platforms, and observed 30 pairs of infants aged 13 months to 19 months and their mothers for 20 minutes. The mothers were instructed to play with their children as they normally would in their homes. From the moms’ and toddlers’ perspective, it was a fairly low-tech challenge. The children didn’t have to wear any monitoring devices and the mothers didn’t have to keep track of anything except keeping baby from doing a faceplant off the little slide. Behind the scenes, however, was whirring along.

Using wall-mounted and hand-held video cameras, researchers tracked mothers’ and babies’ even-miniscule movements, which were then analyzed by cutting-edge recording technology and machine-learning. The lab is among the first to document in this ultra-high-tech way what babies see, hear and do in their everyday lives, and how the input changes when infants acquire new knowledge and skills as they develop.

The lab developed , a free, open-source coding tool, to powerfully annotate this video data and founded����a secure web-based video library, now available for other scientists to use in their research on human movement.

What the researchers discovered in the mother-child synchrony study was the mother-child dyads do engage in a coordinated, related way as they moved through the playroom, though not all synchronize in the same way.

“In this lab playground environment with things to climb on and things babies maybe could fall off of, we found that moms and babies synchronize their locomotor activity,” Hoch says. “More interesting is that we found two distinct groups that accomplished that synchrony differently. One group had a leader-follower dynamic and the other had a dynamic where both the baby and the mother went away and then came back to their partner.”

The mothers and babies didn’t mirror each other’s movements, but their locomotion was coordinated and correlated, indicating that they scaled their movements to each other. Patterns of locomotion differed among the mother-child duets with about half the moms keeping pace with their infants and following whenever the child veered in a certain direction (see “faceplant” above). The other half of mom and baby duos “yo-yoed” to and from each other, with the infants doing most of the back-and-forth, often in an attempt to get Mama’s attention or just to touch base for a little dollop of social interaction. And then off they would go again.

Differences in how much the children moved and the ground they covered were not influenced by differences in age, experience or walking skills. Predictably, the babies moved much more than the mothers did and covered more ground relative to their size, with moms able to cover the territory they just galloped over with three big steps to their 30. (Some of the lab’s earlier research found that the average toddler clocks more than two and a half miles a day.)

“In general, mothers move about a third as much as their babies do,” Hoch says, “but how much they move is correlated with their babies’ movement. The best predictor of how much moms move is how much their babies move.” Baby leads, Mama follows, moving in close when they climb too high or get too close to edges. In turn, mothers sometimes take the lead in ways that expand the child’s horizons—encouraging them to take a look at this or that thing just out of their reach. “�³󲹳�’s over here?” “Look at this!”

In addition to supporting the theory that mothers and babies synchronize their movements, this and related studies provide a few other important takeaways, the researchers say. One is that toddlers don’t need a destination to get in motion: They just move to be moving.

“We have found that a lot of our ‘commonsense’ assumptions are just wrong,” Adolph says. “Like everyone else, we thought, ‘Well, babies move for the same reason we do. To get to a destination. And, of course, they can. But if you put toys or snacks on the floor, about half the time, they’ll just walk to the other end of the room.”

Another takeaway from observing the babies is how they play with different types of toys. “When the babies have things like a stroller or balls, a broom and rolling carts, not having their mom right there isn’t a big deal,” Adolph says. “But when the toys are manipulative, like shape sorters or a Pop-Up Pal, the babies just carry them around. When the caregivers come play with them, it depresses locomotor activity and boosts manual play.

“That’s how caregivers play with little babies. They don’t do a lot of, ‘Let’s run, run, run. Chase me!’ stuff. They’re more like, ‘�³󲹳�’s this? Look at this thing? �³󲹳�’s this called? Let’s put that shape here …’ Which is what you want if you want your child to learn manual and fine motor skills. Babies are going to learn how to run and walk and explore the larger environment without their caregiver. But to learn the toys requiring fine motor skills, they need a knowledgeable adult with them to help them discover what to do.”

Another important takeaway, Adolph says, is how adept babies are at making their own fun. Left to their own devices with just about anything they can manipulate with their hands — a building block, a crumpled piece of paper, the dog food bowl — they’re going to have fun with it whether it comes with a “Made for Babies” label or not. (This information should gladden the heart of anyone working on a holiday gift list for the 3-and-under set: Get them a set of plastic measuring cups and some nesting mixing bowls and don’t go crazy with trending toys from big name brands.)

Their paper, “Dancing’ Together: Infant-Mother Locomotor Synchrony,” proposes that both the face-to-face and locomotor synchrony that researchers have observed serve a similar function in the child’s development. They create a pathway — a scaffold — to the child’s interactions with the outside world. In coordinating face-to-face with mother or other caring adults, babies learn social skills, how to coordinate their attention with another human, how to interact with objects — how to be social beings in the complex world they now inhabit. And once they get their walking papers, whole new realms open. With Mother’s support and synchrony, they can move beyond the blanket and start investigating boundaries.

The work being done at the Infant Action Lab shines a bright light on the mother-baby social dance that gives infants what they need to make their way in the big, wide world.

Babies occupy a world of wonder — huge and fascinating — and are bombarded via their senses with new information at every turn. From the very beginning, says Dr. Alison Gopnik, head of the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, human infants are driven by the desire to find out. Their investigations are not random but are driven by the same mechanisms that scientists use to develop theories, she says. Babies are exploring their world in ways that are exquisitely intelligent and sensitive.

For decades, a common understanding was that babies arrive as a “blank slate” that life writes on, creating the child’s reality. Not so, says Gopnik, an internationally recognized authority on children’s learning and development, and her colleagues who have studied babies for decades. Babies are born knowing certain things. From birth, they are aware of some physical properties of objects. Newborns follow objects as they appear in and out of range and they quickly begin to recognize the faces that show up in their field of vision. Very early on, newborns will begin to mimic adults’ facial expressions, such as sticking out their tongue. Consider the sequence of cognitive and physical abilities that have to be in play for just that tiny moment of an infant sticking out her tongue in response to an adult’s action and you might begin to be as blown away by babies’ innate capacities as Gopnik and her fellow researchers are.

Children develop theories, Gopnik says. They develop abstract, coherent systems of entities and rules, particularly as they consider causation — What makes that person come back and feed me? They make predictions based on evidence and they change their minds when they discover new things.

Babies are little trackers for useful information, paying attention to interesting things, and they’re completely intolerant of boredom. They don’t like to look at random things, but when they see a pattern and the opportunity to predict an outcome? They’re all in.

“One of the pieces of conventional wisdom about babies and young children has been that they aren’t good at abstract relational thinking,” Gopnik says. “But we’ve just done a paper that shows even 3-year-olds are very good at solving abstract problems.

“For example, if you say, ‘Look, here’s a wizard. The wizard waved her hand, and it made this little dog into a big dog. Now she’s going to wave her hand one more time at this little toy. What will happen when she waves her wand?’ And the child will tell you, ‘Oh, the little toy will be a big toy!’

“That’s the kind of thinking that’s tested on fancy IQ tests: ‘This is to this as this is to that.’ And it turns out that even very little children are surprisingly good at solving those tasks if you ask in the right way.”

Babies can also do a primitive kind of addition and subtraction, Gopnik says. If you put one toy behind a screen and then another one, they’ll be surprised if you lift the screen and there’s one toy or three toys, but not if there are two toys. They may not have the language to say one plus one equals two, but they put the idea together through observation.

During a child’s early years, their is chugging away, observing, connecting the constellations of neurons that make up the baby’s brain, driven by curiosity and learning about their world through experience and practice. In this wide-open state, babies and young children are easily distractible, and all options are open — which accounts for children’s incredible ability to make up wildly creative play at the drop of a hat. Nothing is ruled out, nothing is too illogical to fit.

This whole paradigm of curiosity — where it comes from, what fuels it, how it can be nurtured — is so complex that it’s one of the conundrums computer scientists working on artificial intelligence have not been able to crack. Gopnik has worked with researchers who are delving into machine learning and artificial intelligence. Some of the new computers are ridiculously smart, she says, and great at problem solving. But no one has cracked the code as to how to train them to be curious.

Humans’ unbound curiosity is a great evolutionary strategy for learning massive amounts of information, Gopnik says, but at some point, it becomes a detriment for success in daily living. At some point, humans have to take all the information they’ve amassed and put it to work to get on in life. Our survival depends on being able to stop wondering and know unmistakably that the knife is sharp, that berry is poisonous and the A train won’t get us to the Bronx.

Around the age of 5, she says, the connections that are formed get stronger and more efficient as others are pruned and disappear. At this point, the brain’s executive office begins taking over, developing the prefrontal control that allows us to ignore distractions, focus on individual tasks and plan for what’s coming next.

A significant key to this developmental trajectory, Gopnik says, appears to be having a safe, secure, caring environment in which to do all that early exploration.

“I don’t know that we’ve proved this yet,” she says, “but we can see from some ongoing research that the context of being cared for actually helps children to be curious and find out about the world. Children are born with the same kind of curiosity, but their environment can either be one where they can be safe to explore or one that says, ‘This is rough and difficult; ��you should just concentrate on being safe.’

“Children are really good at being curious; it’s hard to stop them. But having to do too many things to survive, having those strong demands on their attention can destroy a child’s curiosity. The good news is, we’ve looked at children in Headstart programs, children in third-world countries and they’re all capable of curiosity and learning.

“It is important to say, however, that the 20% of American children who are growing up in poverty and growing up in isolation do not necessarily have the basic conditions for that curiosity. We have a lot of work to do there. But once you have those basic prerequisites in place, let the kid loose and you’ll see curiosity and learning.”

The ironic quality about curiosity and learning, Gopnik says, is that grownups can’t make their children be curious any more than scientists can teach computers curiosity, and, unlike computers, adults can’t actually make children learn.

“One thing that I observe particularly with middle-class parents here in the Bay Area is that they take this kind of approach like, ‘I really, really want my child to be curious and explorative and literate, so I’m going to sit there and make sure he’s curious.’ I think that, especially in these very high-investment parenting situations, just chilling out and practicing a little benign neglect is probably the best approach.

“Leave them alone, let them know they’re loved; make sure they have the resources they need and then leave them alone and let them explore. Adults are not good at making children learn. They just learn, so let them do it.”

Gopnik stresses that parents do have a role to play in their children’s education about life but would like them to stop seeing themselves as “just another school.” Children don’t need to be taught so much as included. They learn more naturally from watching people do what they’re good at and that they want to do.

“My favorite example is cooking with children — they love to cook with grownups. When you’re cooking with children, you’re actually doing something useful. Cooking, gardening, going out shopping, talking with your friends — if you’re doing all the things that are a part of your child’s life and are a little bit patient (because it takes twice as long if you’re cooking with a child), your child from an early age is learning to do things, learning to be confident.

“Babies and toddlers are maximum scientists, at a point where curiosity is the most important thing. Then, children are like little apprentices, learning from the adults in their lives how to put all those theories together in a social world and be effective human beings.”