Welcome to Baby Hearts

Excerpted from
Baby Hearts: A Guide to Giving Your Child an Emotional Head Start
By Linda Acredolo, Ph.D., Susan Goodwyn, Ph.D.

We chose these words to begin Baby Hearts because they seemed to us to capture the depth of feeling we ourselves experienced when first given our newborn babies to hold. We each were blessed with two wonderful children, now grown, who changed our lives forever-and for the better. The fact that the moments when we first "met" each of them remain so vivid in our memories is testimony to how intense our feelings were at the time and how overwhelmed we were by the responsibility we'd just been given. We both remember being awed by the miracle of birth-and amazed that the hospital staff was actually allowing us to take these helpless babies home! They seemed to trust us to care for these children more than we trusted ourselves.

Such feelings are almost universally shared by parents of newborns. The desire to do right by their children is strong in those early days and, fortunately, remains strong in the vast majority of parents from then on. But how, exactly, does one "do right"? How does a parent know what to do when confronted by the myriad daily problems that inevitably arise in trying to guide a child through the ups and downs of life? There's no one answer to this question, of course. But what there is-and what we plan to share with you in this book-is advice drawn from research studies conducted in laboratories around the world, particularly advice relevant to the emotional lives of children.

Our previous books, Baby Signs and Baby Minds, were both focused on the intellectual side of development, how babies communicate and how they think. In Baby Hearts we are switching gears and tackling a very different aspect of life during those first critical years, one that has been described by researchers as among the most intriguing and important frontiers of child development research: how babies feel. However, before we begin explaining why researchers believe this to be the case, what their research has revealed, and how you can benefit from knowing more about it, we want to take a moment to share with you the story of how we came to write this book.

When a Baby's Actions Speak Louder Than His Words

Many of you are already familiar with our first book, Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk. In that book we describe the benefits to children and parents alike of encouraging babies and toddlers to use simple signs to communicate before they can talk. We also summarize the two decades of research we conducted at the University of California at Davis to back up our claims. One major component of this research program was a long-term study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in which we compared signing and nonsigning babies as they moved through infancy into the preschool and elementary school years. A story told to us by the mother of one of the babies in the signing group taught us how much more knowledgeable babies are about their feelings than we had imagined and, ultimately, provided the inspiration for Baby Hearts.

By the time he was fifteen months old, Zack knew over thirty signs, and both he and his mother, Cathy, were thrilled with the world of communication that signing was opening up for them. In fact, in addition to the many signs he had learned directly from Cathy, Zack had also made up some signs of his own, including a sign to let his parents know when he was afraid. If a big dog or a scary person came too close for comfort, Zack would simply start patting his chest vigorously with the palm of his hand. Seeing this, his parents would quickly scoop him up into the safety of their arms and all would be well. That was impressive enough, but it was an event that took place in the middle of one night that really made Cathy take notice. And when we heard about it, we did the same. Here's what happened.

It began one night about 2:15 A.M. when Cathy heard Zack begin to wail. As she hurriedly entered his room, he stopped crying, looked toward a clown doll sitting on his dresser, and began repeatedly patting his chest with his open palm. "I knew right away what was wrong," Cathy told us. "He'd gotten the doll as a present earlier that day, and I thought it would be nice for him to have it close by when he woke up in the morning. Boy, was I wrong. He was telling me quite clearly that he was afraid of the doll. I guess a clown doll during the day isn't exactly the same as a clown doll at night!" And just as she suspected, as soon as Cathy took the doll away, Zack settled back down to sleep.

But what if Zack hadn't had that sign to use to let her know he was afraid? This is the point that gave us goose bumps when we heard it. "Just think," Cathy continued, "if all I'd seen when I walked in the room was Zack crying and pointing at the doll he'd enjoyed during the day, guess what I would have done? I would have thought he was crying because he wanted the doll and would have put it in the crib with him! Not exactly the way to build a trusting relationship."

Emotional Intelligence Starts Young

What we found so important about Cathy's story was that at only fifteen months, Zack had recognized and labeled his own emotion and, in doing so, had helped his mother respond to him in exactly the right-rather than in exactly the wrong way. Does this mean that Zack is an emotional genius? Many scientists, along with many parents, would conclude just that. Although it's clear to everyone that even tiny babies are capable of expressing internal emotions through crying and smiling, until very recently most child development professionals have assumed that the kind of evaluation of his own emotions that Zack had done, followed by the purposeful communication of that emotion through a symbol (patting the chest), was well beyond the ability of a fifteen-month-old child.

However, taking a closer look at the records of other children in our signing studies, we found clear evidence that Zack was not alone in his emotional sophistication. Other babies, it turned out, had also used "emotion" signs well before they could say the words, for example, to communicate that they were happy, sad, or angry. They would sign "gentle" when their mother was being too rough changing their diaper or sign "hurt" when they had an ear infection. Obviously, "talking" about feelings is far from a rare event, at least for toddlers lucky enough to have access to simple signs. (For descriptions of these emotion signs as well as many other helpful signs, see the glossary at the end of Baby Signs.)

Our search for other evidence of emotional intelligence in infants and toddlers then began in earnest. We quickly discovered that our observations were consistent with discoveries being made in research laboratories around the world. Far from being a time when humans are oblivious to what happens to them, suffering only in the here-and-now from the obvious problems of hunger, thirst, and cold, the first years of life are critically important to a child's future emotional, social, and even intellectual development. What's more, give them a chance and infants and toddlers will tell you so-just as Zack did.

You've Come a Long Way, Baby!

It's taken babies an embarrassingly long time to convince the adults around them that they (babies) are smarter than they look, especially about emotions, and that what happens to them even in the first months of life leaves a lasting impression. As we said, it's always been clear that babies cry when they are unhappy and smile when they are pleased with themselves or the world. But until the middle of the twentieth century, most people, researchers included, assumed that these emotional expressions were simply automatic reactions to what was happening in the moment, reactions without any long-term consequences. A baby might be upset at a particular point in time, but that emotion was not thought to leave any kind of permanent trace in the baby's mind or heart. And it certainly wasn't anything that adults needed to be concerned about. Crying, after all, was "good for the lungs." Hmph!

Fortunately, such an uncaring attitude seems incredible to any parent who has taken a recent child development course in high school or college. However, its truth is sobering evidence of how far the science of developmental psychology has come in the last forty years. In his captivating book about the history of research on emotions and babies, Becoming Attached, Dr. Robert Karen describes specifically the attitude of researchers and politicians to the frequent death of orphaned babies cared for in well-run institutions of the early twentieth century. To the adults of the day, "These little creatures were not yet people and could not have real human feelings. They didn't become sad or lonely. If they deteriorated, there were other reasons: They may not have been hardy; they may have been broken by disease. But they certainly did not need others in any emotional or psychological way."

Additional evidence of the progress made in the last forty years is found in the profound changes that have taken place in adoption policies. Ask any adult today what the best age is for a child to be adopted and, nine times out of ten, the answer will be as soon after birth as possible. And that's absolutely correct. But, you say, isn't that just common sense? Unfortunately for centuries of children, the answer was no. Because nothing that happened during the first two years mattered anyway, the idea was to wait until age two or three so that adoptive parents could be sure what kind of child they were getting!