Eye contact is one of the first milestones you'll notice. Babies usually start looking you in the eye when they are about six to eight weeks old.
Your face is going to be what they look at most, so if your baby doesn't make eye contact by their two month well visit, be sure to mention it to your pediatrician so they can take another look. Another milestone that should come around the same time is the social smile. This isn't the spontaneous smile that happens when your baby passes gas. It's the smile that your baby gives when you smile at your baby and your baby smiles back at you.
It's a sign that the vision and social parts of his brain are developing. Your baby should be smiling by three to four months old. If not, it could be a vision problem or a problem attaching to parent figures. Next is babbling by six months. This is different from cooing that newborns do because it requires babies to figure out how to use their tongue and the front of their mouth to make sounds like da, ba, ga, ma.
No, your baby will not say mama or dada and know they are referring to you as parents specifically, although I do get told that a lot. Recognizing you guys and saying mama and dada and meaning mama and dada is closer to nine-month scale. Be sure to encourage the babbling by talking back to your baby. This is how they learn language skills. That's one reason why, as a pediatrician, seeing babies and their parents at the 2-month-old checkup is always a great pleasure.
The exhausting days when they were newly home from the hospital are behind them. The baby's fussy, crying -for-no-good-reason periods are becoming less frequent. The parents and baby have finally started to develop a rhythm to their days and nights. Now awake for longer periods, babies start to communicate in the best way they know how—through their smiles. At this milestone checkup, I will ask parents, "Is she smiling yet? They may smile at the baby and gently croon or tickle her.
The baby then obliges by smiling back with a happy wiggle. They may even coo, another social skill babies usually start working on this month. Sometimes I wonder how parents get anything done around the house with all this delightful back-and-forth going on.
Often, parents will remark that they've seen the baby smile at them practically since birth. I'm never going to disagree with a proud parent on that point. However, it's probably not exactly true. Yes, there are some adorable grimaces and grins that parents notice in baby's first month.
Where do these come from? We don't quite know. It often seems like the baby is responding to some internal signal, like gas or hunger. Those primitive, often random grins are indeed different from the social smile that we'll see weeks later. Whenever the parents of a 2-week-old infant say that their baby is already smiling, I simply tell them, "Just wait, it gets even better.
Why is the social smile different? Babies spend more of their second month awake and paying attention to all they see and hear around them. They learn that their family cares for them when they are hungry or fussy or tired. They likely feel excited and loved when people smile at them, and one day their own smile breaks out in return.
Early Signs of Autism. Her social smile will soon become another way for her to communicate with you and connect with the world around her. To help your baby along, smile at her, cuddle her, play with her and talk to her often.
You can't spoil a newborn, and numerous studies have shown that babies who receive lots of parental care and affection early on develop faster, have larger brains and are more sociable. So if you can't wait to see those first real smiles, snuggle away, and smile at her like she's the best thing since sliced bread which, really, she is.
Just as some adults are quicker to smile than others, some babies are too. If your 1-month-old still isn't smiling, don't be alarmed. That first "real" smile can seem frustratingly elusive, because for even some of the happiest babies, it can happen any time between 4 weeks and 4 months of age.
You may have heard that a delay in smiling is considered an early indicator for autism spectrum disorder. And while this is true, a delay in smiling is very rarely the only symptom that a child on the autism spectrum will exhibit. If your child hasn't smiled by 4 months but vocalizes, makes eye contact and responds to verbal and visual cues from you, she just might not be a naturally smiley personality — at least, not at this early stage in her development.
Of course, you can always discuss any concerns you may have with your pediatrician. What to Expect follows strict reporting guidelines and uses only credible sources, such as peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions and highly respected health organizations.
Learn how we keep our content accurate and up-to-date by reading our medical review and editorial policy. The educational health content on What To Expect is reviewed by our medical review board and team of experts to be up-to-date and in line with the latest evidence-based medical information and accepted health guidelines, including the medically reviewed What to Expect books by Heidi Murkoff.
This educational content is not medical or diagnostic advice.
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