The bond grows between parents and their baby during this stage. Around 2 months of age, your baby will have a "social" smile. That is a smile made with purpose as a way to engage others. Around this same time to about 4 months of age, babies develop an attachment to their caregivers. They more readily stop crying for familiar caregivers than for strangers.
They draw people to them by making and keeping eye contact, moving their arms, and smiling. By about 4 to 6 months of age, babies become increasingly social and love to cuddle and laugh.
They become expressive and may "flirt" with their doctor or people across a room. Facial expressions now consistently reflect anger, joy, interest, fear, disgust, or surprise. During the period between 6 and 9 months of age, babies who are cared for in a loving and consistent way develop a powerful bond with their parents and other significant people in their lives. As this bond strengthens, babies learn to trust caregivers. They develop a memory and a marked preference for loved ones and begin to recognize others as strangers.
You may notice that your baby begins to really smile at around 3 months. In reality, however, they may have been able to melt a heart or two with their smiles while tucked away in your belly.
Studies have shown that fetuses are capable of smiling at around 33 weeks of gestation. This type of smile is often described as a reflex action—much like kicking or sucking the thumb in the womb. They can happen without a reaction and usually do not need visual stimulation to occur.
Another potential reason for smiling could simply be that your baby has gas! Babies have been described as smiling while passing gas or stool. At around the three-month mark, you may notice a change in the way your child picks and chooses moments to smile.
By this time, they have been given the opportunity to interact with their environment. Babies may have learned some social cues. Social smiles appear around this time as a sign of attentive engagement with an interactive caregiver. Regardless of whether or not it is reflex, social, or in reaction to passing gas, you can choose to interpret your child's smile the best way you see fit. The important thing is that they are healthy and engaging with their environment.
It may look peaceful on the outside, but a lot goes on in our bodies as we sleep. We'll be taking a sneak peek into our heads to understand how the kinds of sleep we experience help to put smiles on our faces as we snooze. Your body will typically go through two basic types of sleep: rapid eye movement REM and non-rapid eye movement non-REM sleep. You go through all stages of each type of sleep several times a night.
We'll be taking special notice of REM sleep, which is where smiling during sleep is most likely to occur. There are 3 stages of non-REM sleep:. This occurs after about 90 minutes of sleep. In this phase, your eyes will move rapidly about behind your eyelids, and you start to get closer to waking.
Your breathing gets quicker and irregular, while your heart rate and blood levels increase to around the points experienced during waking hours. In this phase of sleep, you'll experience some temporary paralysis in your leg and arm muscles to prevent you from getting a little too enthusiastic and acting out your dreams. If you notice your baby smiling or laughing while asleep, it is probably happening during this phase, although it is more accurately known as "active sleep" in children.
Studies have shown that babies may experience smiles, grimaces, body twitches, and sucking in this phase. Babies smile on reflex without exactly meaning to, or without it being in reaction to a person or thing. As time goes on, you may notice your little one smile when passing gas or stool, perhaps in response to the enjoyable feeling. There are also instances where babies have sensory responses to taste or smell.
It isn't unheard of for babies to stretch out a smile when they come in contact with a smell or taste they find pleasant. As children become more familiar with their environment, you may notice your baby start to smile when they see a familiar face, or perhaps because they are aware it will produce a reaction from you. When it comes to babies smiling in their sleep, however, there's still some grey area. Since we have no way of knowing if babies dream, or what they dream about, it may be a safe assumption that their smiling which typically occurs during active sleep is a reflex action, and is most likely involuntary.
In the event that babies do dream however, a smile in their dream could be in reaction to a memory that occurred during the day, or an event strung together by their subconscious. Catching a baby's smile during sleep is always a joy to experience. When we asked parents to observe and record smiling in their children for a study, they reported the first "social smiles" of their babies just after four weeks on average.
When researchers started observing infants, most of their initial results were not that different from the parental reports. A study from , which defined "social smiles" as seeking eye-contact before smiling , found that none of the babies in the study smiled during the first week. Only 11 percent showed a social smile by two weeks of age.
About 60 percent had socially smiled by three weeks, and almost all of them had socially smiled within the first month. Some researchers still fail to register smiles early on, and many smiles occur during sleep—unrelated to the social world. Indeed, even foetuses, observed within the womb with a 4D ultrasonographic method, smile from at least the 23rd week of gestation. But other studies show that newborns do smile on rare occasions—at most once in every four minutes for some one-day-olds.
And the question now is what those smiles mean. There have long been signs that newborn smiles could signal positive emotions to some extent. Smiles have been noted in the first few days of life as a response to stroking of the cheek or the belly.
Newborns also smile in response to sweet tastes and smells. These findings were published decades ago when smiles were considered purely as innate reflexes. The reason that scientists at the time didn't interpret them as emotional was partly because the smiles looked different to social smiles. Neonatal smiles were thought to involve only the mouth region.
However, when scientists micro-analysed facial movements, frame by frame, using a dedicated coding system , smiles from as early as one day of age were more often than not accompanied by cheek and eye movements. More and more studies have since suggested that newborn babies do smile when they are awake, and that these smiles closely resemble real social smiles.
And when newborns are in an interactive, awake state, they smile twice as much as compared to when they are asleep —more evidence that social factors could be involved.
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