Our Babies, Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent by anthropologist Meredith F. Small is one book I have been looking to buy but I haven't been able to find it at any of the bookstores. Anyhow, on LiveScience today, there's an article on babies' attention to social interaction and reminds us how critical it is for us to be there, attentive and loving to them right from day one.

Excerpts from the article Your Baby is Watching (and Judging) You:

Experiments years ago by Jeffery Cohn and Edward Tronick of Children's Hospital in Boston also showed that babies have a natural distrust of even their most trusted caretakers when the social rules are not followed. Mothers were instructed to not respond when the baby reached to get her attention for a little one-on-one interaction. Instead, mothers looked back at the baby with a blank face and didn’t move. Aghast, the babies kept trying for a while and then gave up, went limp and turned away.

More startlingly, when the mothers were told to engage again, the babies refused, at first, to pay attention. They just didn’t trust someone who ignored the rules of engagement, even for a minute.

Psychologist J. Kiley Hamlin and colleagues of Yale University recently showed 6- to 10-month old babies various social situations using triangles, squares and circles that play acted helping or hindering each other. The babies clearly disliked the objects that didn't help out. The psychologists concluded that babies are good judges of character, even when they're not directly involved in the action.

This research is a surprise because no one thought babies were paying that much attention to the acts of others. And no one realized baby judgments were so harsh.

Apparently, we were fooled into thinking babies were social dunces by their sneaky ways. Human babies, with their wobbly heads and unfocused stares, look like they aren't paying attention to much of anything.

So remember, the baby is watching. That spaced-out look on her face might not be the start of a nap but the very moment in which she is deciding if you, in particular, are trustworthy.

Technorati: baby psychology, parenting