How To Talk To A Newborn: Proven Strategies For Effective Decoding And Communication With Your Newborn

How the Newborn Brain Processes Sound

Newborn’s Sensory Development

• Touch: It is the first thing a baby experiences at birth. Touch is crucial for bonding and maintaining body temperature. Positive touch experiences, such as cuddling and skin-to-skin contact, enhance neural growth and reduce stress.
• Vision: Newborns' vision is immature, yet they show a preference for contrast patterns, lines, faces, and visual stimuli. Within a few weeks of birth, newborns can recognise their mother's face, which helps in emotional development.
• Smell: Olfactory senses develop before birth, and for newborns, it helps them recognise their mother's familiar scent to support bonding and breastfeeding, and to recognise the environment.
• Hearing: Auditory systems help in recognising complex sounds and patterns. Plastic auditory cortices help neonates process pitch, rhythm, and phonetic features. Even before birth, the foetus becomes familiar with sounds and speech, which helps enhance interaction after birth.

Decoding Newborn Cues

• Hunger: Understanding hunger cues is crucial for caregiving and feeding. Waking, crying, increased alertness, body movement, smacking lips, sucking fingers or fists, opening the mouth, and rooting reflex are some hunger cues. In the early stage, once the baby is full, they show decreased physical activity and detach from their nipples. After around 9 months, they show more passive behaviours.
• Sleep: Infants spend most of their time sleeping. A long, restful sleep is important for brain maturation, memory consolidation, and emotional regulation. Yawning, rubbing eyes, increased fussiness, low physical activity, staring widely, glazed eyes, and stretching indicate readiness to sleep.
• Overstimulation: When sensory input becomes too much for babies to handle, it can cause distress in infants. Increased irritability, clenching of fists, jerky movements, crying, head movement, redness in the skin, altered breathing patterns, and refusing to feed are some signs of overstimulation.
• Discomfort: When a baby is stressed or needs caregivers' attention, they exhibit signs such as shutting and squeezing their eyes, frowning, squirming, hiccups, clenched fists, altered breathing pattern, increased heart rate, and high-pitched crying. Recognising and responding to discomfort cues reduces stress response and promotes relaxation and recovery.
• Curiosity: Engaging with caregivers and the environment fosters cognitive growth, attention, and interaction. Responsive facial expressions, wide eyes, focused on certain objects, and curious eye contact often indicate that the baby is actively processing information. Taking babies for walks, asking questions, and engaging in cognitive stimulating activities promote curiosity and a drive to learn and explore.

How to Communicate Back

• Parentese: Also known as infant-directed speech, involves exaggerated speech, a slow tempo, a melodic voice, clear pauses, elongated words, clear articulation, and an emotionally engaging tone. Motherese or baby talk helps enhance attention, facilitate language learning, activate neurons, and encourage conversations.
• Rhythm: Newborns can detect rhythmic patterns in the sounds and voices they encounter. They also show rhythmic motor responses to align with the beats. Speaking at a slow pace, using melodic voices, varied pitches, stressing words, clapping, tapping, gentle rocking, and responding to the infant's babbles helps enhance interaction and learning.
• Touch Strategies: Touch is integral for connection building, emotional regulation, and cognitive development. Gentle stroking on arms, back, and head, as well as tickling, patting, skin-to-skin contact, hugging, and cuddling, all help support emotional bonding and enhance the positive effect.
• Eye Contact: Maintaining mutual eye contact enhances brainwave synchronisation between the baby and caregiver, which supports communication and learning. Within the first few weeks of birth, infants develop the ability to maintain eye contact, and by 4 to 6 months, eye fixation increases.
• Responsive Feeding: Caregivers should attentively interpret and respond immediately to the infant’s hunger signals. Responsive feeding is associated with healthy weight gain, improved dietary patterns, strengthened attachments and enhances language learning.
• Co-regulation: Actively supporting babies in managing their emotions through interactions. Holding, rocking, skin-to-skin contact, gentle tone with eye contact, feeding, bathing, and observing and decoding their cues help in reducing distress and behavioural problems, and enhance resilience and attention.

FAQs on How To Talk To A Newborn: Proven Strategies For Effective Decoding And Communication With Your Newborn

1. How do newborns know their mother?
   Newborns recognise their mother through scent, voice, and touch. Newborns start hearing and recognising their mother's voice even before birth. While babies are still in the womb, they become familiar with their mother’s smells through amniotic fluid, which helps them recognise their mother after birth. Mother’s warmth and comfort through nursing, skin-to-skin contact, and cuddling help the baby differentiate between their mothers and strangers.
2. What sound do babies like?
   Babies love the familiar sound of their caregiver, repetitive songs, white noise, pink noise, and relaxing music. Mothers can talk to their baby in an exaggerated and rhythmic pitch and play music and nature sounds on a mobile to help the baby learn and acquire language skills.