Every baby has their own personality.
It seems that from birth, each baby will have their own opinions and preferences about certain activities and if they don’t want to do something you might have a real fight on your hands! Certainly from around 3 months old, most babies will realise that their behaviour can influence the behaviours of those around them. This is the age at which many parents will begin to see their baby develop social smiling, initiate “conversation” in the form of babbling, and take more interest in their own body and the movements it can make. As babies begin to assert their new found agency (or their developing independence), the parent-infant relationship will begin to look more like a two-way interaction (often described as bi-directional). Your behaviour influences the baby, and their behaviour influences you.
One of the behavioural processes that is involved in developing this bi-directional relationship is known as synchrony. Synchrony refers to the ways that changes in the parent and infant’s behaviour and states of emotion (often referred to as affect) happens in real time, and the ways in which the behaviours change as a result of the other partner’s behaviour. Synchrony can be seen in both verbal and non-verbal actions, for example through body movements and touch, through vocalisations (whether that is you talking to your baby or your baby “talking” back to you), and through gaze and eye contact.
Synchrony can take on multi-modal forms – it is not just mirroring, where parents copy their infants behaviour and vocalisations but instead react in a different way to the behaviour that they have seen in the baby. For example, your baby may make a loud noise, and instead of copying that noise, you react to it by making a surprised face. In this way, synchronous behaviours will look more like a conversation, rather than just mirroring your baby’s noises or faces back to them. Because of this, synchrony between a baby and their parent is often referred to as a ‘dance’ – where one partner reacts to the other with appropriate timing and rhythm. Such synchronous patterns between a parent and infant can boost bonding, promote positive relationships, and encourage social development.
Researchers often start looking at synchrony when infants turn 3 months old and will continue well into early childhood (and even beyond). A lot of the work that researchers do focuses on understanding what factors might cause a risk to the synchrony between mother and infant, and also what factors might promote greater synchrony. One of the elements of this study is to explore what risk and protective factors have been suggested for dyadic synchrony in infants aged between 3 and 9 months old (an important stage of development for social interactions).
