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Reciprocal Interactions as the Foundation for Parent-Infant Attachment
At a recent gathering of new parents, a mother admiring her four-week-old baby said, "I talk to her all of the time, but sometimes I feel like I must be crazy because, you know, I am the only one there."
Where did the baby fit into this statement? This was obviously a loving parent. The emergence of the social smile in her baby would certainly awaken this mother to the reciprocal nature of interactions that were already going on. Still, her comment represents pervasive, cultural messages that we are not fully human -- not really there -- until we can speak for ourselves. Central to any healthy relationship is the belief that we will be heard. What can educators and health care professionals do to support an awareness of reciprocity from the beginning of this most central of human relationships?
Sensory development in the prenatal period allows the baby to engage the environment socially at birth -- and before. The tactile sense is the first to develop prenatally and the most refined sense at birth. Auditory development is completed during the prenatal period. Once any remaining amniotic fluid is absorbed, the newborn's hearing is as good as an older child's. Auditory ability gives us the clearest picture of prenatal learning. Newborn babies show a marked preference for voices heard during the prenatal period. DeCasper and Spence (1986) demonstrated that babies recognize a story read to them twice a day in the last six weeks of pregnancy when compared to an unfamiliar story that was heard for the first time after birth. Furthermore, the unborn baby often habituates to sounds that might be considered disturbing, for example, barking of a family dog or airplanes flying overhead, showing a remarkable ability to filter these sounds out after birth.
At birth, the newborn's sense of taste is acute. Babies show a preference for sweet over sour tastes (Lipsitt 1977). Rosenstein and Oster (1988) demonstrated that when exposed to the taste of various substances, newborns made facial expressions very much like adults exposed to the same tastes, providing evidence that such facial expressions are innate. Like the sense of taste, the sense of smell is well developed at birth. In a...