How to Nurture a Healthy Relationship with your Baby
- Dena Bradford
- Feb 24
- 7 min read
A Comprehensive Resource for Parents of Infants: Nurturing Healthy Development & Relationships
Forming a strong emotional bond between you and your new baby is one of the most important things you can do to help set the foundation for your child to have a solid childhood and a successful life.
Strong, positive bonds between babies and primary caregivers form secure
attachments required for healthy emotional development over a lifespan.
Even though your baby cannot speak, your baby's brain is already working like a small computer program. The more positive emotional interactions you have with your baby, the stronger the connections to emotional areas that correspond to trust and autonomy become.
The output of this is a child who is better equipped to navigate life successfully.
Babies form emotional attachments using verbal and non-verbal cues to communicate with primary caregivers. These queues can include making faces, crying, using hands and body language, making sounds, and laughter. These nonverbal cues align with a baby's stages of development, and luckily for us, we do not have to unthinkingly guess the timing of developmental stages. Behavioral theorists have done the work for us.
Attachment theory owes its origins to a British psychologist named John Bowlby, who provided a framework called Bowlby's Attachment Theory. This theory emphasizes the importance of the bond between a child and their primary caregiver, suggesting that this attachment influences the child's future emotional and relational development.
Your baby will take on one of four relationship attachment styles listed below as an adult, which is directly related to how you interact with your baby.
One of these attachment styles is secure, while the other three are insecure and may negatively impact the baby’s future relationships.
Secure Attachment Style: This is the goal we want to set for ourselves and our children.
Secure Attachment: The first interactions with caregivers were ones of trust and
emotional support. If the baby's needs were met they formed a solid and secure trusting emotional attachment with parents or primary caregivers. This baby will become self-confident as an adult, form relationships quickly, and be more successful in social situations and careers.
Insecure Attachment Styles: The emotional bond between the primary caregiver and the baby is weaker. This baby may develop into an adult who is nervous about exploring the world, struggles with forming trusting relationships, develops weaker social skills, and has more difficulty in social situations and careers.
Anxious Ambivalent: If a child does not get the attention it needs from giving nonverbal and verbal cues and must resort to acting out (crying, yelling, and/or temper tantrums) to get a caregiver's attention, that baby will have an anxious ambivalent attachment style as an adult. As an adult, they will not be as self-confident and may be unpredictable and/or moody in relationships. They may become clingy and need constant reassurance in the relationship for fear
of abandonment.
Anxious Avoidant: If the response to a baby's cries or acts for attention is harsh (yelling or ignoring), or if the baby does not feel they can be vulnerable with the primary caregiver – the child may develop an anxious-avoidant relationship style. As an adult, this child will have a less positive self-image. They may struggle with "letting people in" emotionally because they fear getting hurt. In relationships, this can manifest as being unpredictable and moody. A notable example of this is wanting intimate relationships -- so they will come across as warm and loving
and then become cold and distant at times.
Anxious Disorganized: This attachment style happens when the baby fears the primary caregiver(s). Baby wants to love and bond, but that love and those emotional bonds are emotionally painful. Fear of love and intimacy develops. As an adult, self-image is low, and relationships resemble a pull/push dynamic; this person will want relationships and crave intimacy but will push people away due to trust issues. Trust in self and others is low, and this adult may appear as a mesh of both ambivalent and anxious attachment styles. Developing friendships, maintaining relationships, and creating firm personal boundaries will be more difficult.
John Bowlby initially developed three attachment styles in the 1900s; this work has been added to by a few theorists over time, one of which was Mary Ainsworth, who added the disorganized attachment style and pioneered a test called the "Strange Situation" to determine which attachment styles children as young as one-year-old have developed. This work is incredible because later researchers have identified a child's future success or failure through these experiments to a statistically significant degree based on early attachment styles.
Researchers can predict what path a child is likely to take in life based on early attachment with caregivers while the child is still a toddler. In one well-documented study, Researchers at the University of Minnesota predicted that
a child would drop out of high school at age 3 with 77% accuracy (1).
So, the question becomes, how do parents communicate with babies to show them the positive emotions that babies need to become trusting and self-confident adults?
Two theorists who later followed Bowlby, Saffer, and Emerson, built on Bowlby’s initial theory and further developed four stages of how babies and caregivers bond. Keep in mind that developmental timelines are approximate periods. All babies are unique, so there may be a slight variance between these timeframes and typical milestones.
If you are ever concerned about your child's development, please let your pediatrician or primary care provider know.
Below is a loose matrix tying behavioral attachment stages to milestones developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to use as a guide for the first year of a baby’s life:
1st Stage of Behavioral Development | Asocial Stage – the asocial stage begins at birth and goes up to about 6 weeks after birth. During this time, our baby will primarily communicate by crying; after all, they cannot do much else. Newborns now show a preference for interacting with humans, not necessarily parents, because those bonds are still forming. Your baby may develop many different types of cries depending on what they need. With a bit of patience, you will become a pro in no time. As a caregiver, you want to respond to these cries appropriately to create initial emotional bonds with your baby.
2nd Stage of Behavioral Development | Indiscriminate Stage – The indiscriminate stage of development begins at about 6 weeks of age and goes on until about 6 months. Your baby can begin to tell people apart and start to become more social. This period between six weeks and six months of age is a time when deeper bonds between primary caregivers develop, but there still may be no fear of strangers. This is how we can pass the baby around at the family
gathering without too much fuss. In a typical development path, the baby will not have that fear aspect of personality yet.
Around 4 weeks of age, the baby will begin to make faces at you as a form of nonverbal communication. This can help signal how your baby is feeling emotionally.
Around 6-8 weeks old, babies begin to make eye contact with you. This eye contact is a non-verbal form of communication. This is a powerful bonding and communication style, and making eye communication back to your baby will help show the baby that you are interested and engaged.
Two months, your baby will look up at your face and smile when you talk to them.
Babies should also be calm when spoken to or picked up and make sounds other than crying. You can begin co-regulating with your baby by smiling, holding eye contact with your baby, and using words to align with your non-verbal communication. The baby may also start to show displeasure by arching their back.
At 4 months, your baby is developing more of a personality and will chuckle and laugh a little. They may make noises and/or smiles to get your attention and may coo or make noises back when you try to talk to the baby.
At 6 months, your baby recognizes familiar people; they will laugh, take turns making sounds with you, blow raspberries, make squeaking noises, grab toys, and put them in their mouth.
3rd Stage of Behavioral Development | Specific Stage – The specific stage of
development happens around seven months old. This third stage of development is where babies begin to have separation anxiety and will become fearful when the primary caregiver leaves them, which is a regular and natural occurrence for babies.
4th Stage of Behavioral Development | Multiple Attachments Stage - The stage of multiple attachments begins somewhere around ten to eleven months of age, and the baby starts to deeply bond with grandparents, friends, siblings, and grandparents.
Child development depends on milestones being hit in specific ways and times. These emotional milestones and how they are navigated between primary caregivers and baby will establish the pattern of relationships that baby has with self, friends, work, or future romantic relationships, as well as the worldview for the rest of the child's life.
Interpreting your infants' cues and nonverbal signals is key to helping their development.
Babies must communicate nonverbally using eyes, smiles, and other mechanisms to signal to parents because they have no other options. So, parents must meet infants in the space of expression through nonverbal cues and emotional expressions; they are communicating their needs and feelings.
Because babies and younger children cannot manage feelings on their own, babies watch and model how parents react to their queues for emotional regulation. When a parent responds in a manner appropriate to the child crying or gesturing, the child is comforted and develops trust.
Babies can pick up smiles, facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language; the more expressions and emotions parents provide, the more the baby learns to regulate emotions. Infant eye contact, gaze shifting, joint attention, social referencing, and naming are crucial for communication. (2). Cuddles, smiles, hugs, and soothing let them know they are safe.
Matching baby facial expressions, swaddling, and matching tone—over time, repeated interactions help babies grow and understand their feelings. Fun activities like face-to-face eye gazing, playing, singing, reading, and responding to nonverbal communication with words, touch, and eye contact can also be impactful and essential activities you can regularly do with your baby.
Responding to our babies' emotional signals builds relationships, trust, and security, which is a critical foundation for your child's future relationships. When parents respond appropriately, this teaches infants about their feelings and helps them understand that they are secure. Verbal communication is also essential, but it should be a gentle process.
A terrific way to bridge non-verbal to verbal communication is by acknowledging nonverbal communication from your baby. This acknowledgement encourages future language development naturally. Use these tips and tricks, and in no time, you and your baby will be pros at communicating and bonding.
References
Pelaez, M., & Monlux, K. (2018). Development of Communication in Infants: Implications for Stimulus Relations Research. Perspectives on behavior science, 41(1), 175–188. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-018-0151-z
Sroufe, L. A., Coffino, B., & Carlson, E. A. (2010). Conceptualizing the Role of Early
Experience: Lessons from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study. Developmental review: DR, 30(1), 36–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2009.12.002
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