The Settled Baby

The First Six Months

One day you will find that you have stopped regarding your baby as a totally unpredictable and therefore rather alarming novelty and have begun instead to think of him as a person with tastes, preferences and characteristics of his own. When that happens you will know that he has moved on from being a "newborn" and has gotten himself settled into life. Nobody can date that moment except you. 

A settled baby is manageable proposition. You can tell how he likes to be handled even if it is not the way you would choose to handle him. You know what to expect from him even if it is the worst. You know what frightens him even if it is almost everything. Above all, you can tell when he is happy, however seldom that may be, and when he is miserable, even if that is almost always. So once your baby is settled you know what you are up against. Instead of trying to survive from hour to hour, get through another day, avoid thinking about another week, you can begin to work and plan for reasonable compromises between his needs and those of everyone else.

The baby will make it clear that his prime need is for people, in the shape of you, his constant caretakers. Your love for him may still be problematic, but the dawn of his attachment to you is a matter of sheer necessity. If he is to survive, he has to attach himself to you and ensure that you take care of him. As these first few weeks pass, his interest in people becomes increasingly obvious. Your face fascinates him. Every time it comes within his short focusing range he studies it intently from hairline to mouth, finishing by gazing into your eyes. He listens intently to your voice, kicking a little when he hears it, or freezing into immobility as he tries to locate its source. Soon he will turn his eyes and his head to see who is talking. If you pick him up, he stops crying. If you will cuddle and walk him, he remains content. Whatever else he likes or needs, he clearly likes and needs you. You can begin to have some confidence in yourselves as the parents of this new human being.

But in case these settled responses to your devoted care are not enough to keep you caring, the baby has a trump card still to play. Somewhere between four and eight weeks he is going to smile at you. One day, when he is studying your face in his intent and serious way, he scans down to your mouth and back to your eyes as usual. But as he gazes, his face slowly begins to flower into the small miracle of a wide toothless grin that totally transforms it. For most parents, that's it. He is the most beautiful baby in the world even if his head is still crooked, and the most lovable baby in the world however often he wakes in the night. Few adults can resist a baby's new smiling. Even the most reluctantly dutiful visitors have been known to sneak back to the cribside to try for one more smile, all for themselves. . . .

When the baby smiles it looks like love, but he cannot truly love you yet because he does not know one person from another. His early smiles are an insurance policy against neglect and for pleasant social attention. The more he smiles and gurgles and waves his fists at people, the more they will smile and talk to him. The more attention people pay him, the more he will respond. He will tie them ever closer with his throat-catching grins and his heart-rendingly quivery lower lip. His responses create a self-sustaining circle, his smiles leading to your smiles and yours to more from him.

There is no harm in assuming that these enchanting early smiles are meant for you personally. They soon will be. It is through pleasant social interaction with adults, who find him rewarding and therefore pay him attention, that the baby moves on from being interested in people in general to being able to recognize and attach himself to particular one. By the time he is around three months old it will be clear that he knows you. He will not smile at you and whimper at strangers. He still smiles at everyone. But he saves his best signs of favor, the smiliest smiles, for you. He becomes both increasingly sociable and increasingly fussy about whom he will socialize with. He is ready to form a passionate and exclusive emotional tie with somebody and you are elected.

Under what we still think of as "normal family circumstances" most babies select their mothers for this first love. But it is not the blood-tie which gives you the privilege. The privilege has to be earned. You earn it not so much by being his mother as by mothering him. And mothering does not just mean taking physical care of him. The love he is forming is not cupboard-love, based on the pleasures of feeding. He will fall for people who mother him emotionally, talk to him, cuddling him, smiling and playing. If you had to share his total care with one other person and you handed over all the physical tasks, using your limited time for loving, you would keep your prime role in the baby's life. But if you used your time for his physical needs and left the other person to be his companion, it would be the companionable adult to whom he became most closely attached. He needs someone to come when he needs help or company, someone who notices when he smiles and smiles back, who hears when he "talks," listens and replies. Somebody who plays with him and shows him things, brings little bits of the world for him to see. These are the things which really matter to three-month-old babies. These are the things which make for love.

Every baby needs at least one special person to attach himself to. It is through this first love relationship that he will learn about people and about the world. It is through it that he will experience emotions and learn to cope with them. And it is through this baby-love that he will become capable of more grown-up kinds of love; capable, one far-distant day, of giving to his own children the same kind of devotion he asks for himself now. Babies who never have a special person, receiving adequate physical care but little emotional response, or being looked after by a succession of caretakers, often do not develop as fast or as far as their innate drive and their potential for personality allow. But provided he does have at least one special person, your baby can make other people special too. His capacity for love is not rationed any more than yours is. The reverse is true. Love creates love.

Even today few fathers are in a position to receive their baby's very first attachment because mundane matters like jobs prevent them from being ever-present, always-responsive people. But a father who can accept, support and encourage the unique relationship between his partner and his child will find that there is a unique relationship waiting for him too. It comes a little later and it is built on the first, but it is just as vital to the child.

If two of you are fortunate enough to be able to share your baby's care, the baby will respond equally (though differently since you are different people) to each of you and his emotional life will be both richer and safer for not being vested in one person alone. If you want, or need, to share your time between the baby and an outside job, you need not lose out on the relationship provided that the baby remains - and feels that he is - your primary concern. He need not lose out provided that your part-time replacement is a genuinely loving, mothering figure.

At four or five months, a father who cannot be the person who is always there and continually involved in the baby's routine care may find himself especially valuable. When he does come home, or stays home because it is a weekend, his face, his talk and his play strike the baby as fresh and interesting. Because he has not spent the day trying to fit a sufficiency of chores and sanity-preserving adult activities around the baby's needs, he may be able to offer more of the social contact the baby craves. As the baby grows up enough to remember and anticipate pleasure, a father can concentrate on building his own, peculiarly fatherly, relationship with his child. Instead of competing for the special mother-relationship, he can create his own and may find himself with a prime place in his baby's affections.

Many women passionately enjoy this stage of motherhood. The baby flatters you with his special attentions, making you feel special, beloved, irreplaceable. He needs you for everything. He must have adequate physical care but he must have emotional and intellectual care too: play, toys, help and opportunity to practice each tiny new ability. Whatever the baby becomes able to do, he needs and will want to do it; it is up to you to make it possible for him. Yet, with all this needing, his hour-by-hour care is comparatively easy. He is no longer irrational and incomprehensible as he was when he was newborn, yet he is awake most of the day and into everything as he will be once he can crawl in the second half of the year. You still get daytime periods of peace and privacy and you can still put the baby on the floor and know that he will be safely there when you next look.

But some women hate it. Instead of taking pleasure in being so much enjoyed and needed, they feel shut in and consumed by the baby's dependece. They yearn for at least a little time when the baby needs nothing practical and nothing emotional either. The continual effort of identifying with his feelings, noticing his needs and padding his journey through the passing days makes them feel drained. Once you begin to feel like this, practical care seems easy compared with coping with his loneliness or boredom.

Understanding your own importance is both the prevention and the cure. All the vital developments of these months are waiting inside your baby. He has a built-in drive to practice every aspect of being human, from making sounds, using his hands or rolling over, to eating real food or roaring with laughter. But each aspect is also in your hands. You can help him develop and learn or you can hinder him by holding yourself aloof. You can keep him happy and busy and learning fast or discontented, bored and not learning as fast as he could.    

If you do help him, you and the whole family will gain because the baby will be cheerful and easy and a pleasure to have around - most of the time. If you refuse to help him, trying to ration your attention, everyone will suffer and you will suffer most of all. The baby will be difficult, fretful and no pleasure to anyone. You will be unhappy because, however much you may resent the fact, your pleasure and his are tied together. If you please him, his happines will please you and make it easier for you to go on. If you leave him miserable, his misery will depress you and make it more difficult. You may resent his crying, resent the fact that he needs you - again. But ignoring the crying not only condemns him to cry, it also condemns you to listen to his crying. So when you try to meet his needs, tune in to him, treat him as he asks to be treated; you do not only do it for him, you do it for yourselves, too. Like it or not, you are a family now. You sink or swim together.