By Jane Traulsen, Pampers Parenting Institute consulting editor
In your baby's brand-new world, there are only three things that matter: you, you, and milk. Though you will take in every detail of your newborn's face and body, he'll be looking intently at a large, curved, slightly moving, mostly fuzzy shape. It hovers over him. That would be you, Mom. The more your baby sees your face, the more he wants you.
Just the way you feel about him.
From the very beginning of a baby's life, he makes eye contact with his mother. This is fleeting at first because a newborn has difficulty staying alert and focused. He also may get cross-eyed because he's trying so hard to look carefully at your face.
Faces satisfy many requirements of babies' limited perceptionbright eyes and a dark mouth provide contrast, while the hairline makes a frame to stimulate a baby's peripheral vision. A baby sees the edges of things better than the middle or details. He keeps his eyes on you, and you respond in kind. This mutual gazing is the beginning of a growing bond.
A baby's sense of vision, though hazy at birth, is perfectly in sync with his need to see the person most important to him. A newborn can focus on objects 8 to 12 inches from his eyesjust the distance of Mom's face when she feeds him.
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Taking Close-ups
Imitating You
Stimulating Sight
Tracking Time
Taking Aim
Babies are born to pay attention to people, because they learn the most from them. Evolution has equipped newborns with the kind of vision that suits them bestup close and personal. Thus, the blurriness of a baby's long-distance vision serves as a kind of anti-anxiety device: She isn't overloaded by what she can't use or understand. There's already enough sound and light around her to start her learning about her family and the world.
Scientists agree that babies not only can distinguish faces and show preferences among them, but also seem to recognize the similarity of others' faces to their own. This "just like me" phenomenon is pretty amazing, because a new baby has never seen his own face. Research also suggests that we learn about our own minds by observing others and comparing them with ourselves. This is what makes imitation such a powerful learning tool.
Your baby is seeing his face in yours. This is called mirroring, and it is considered a potent force in establishing a baby's self-awareness.
Later your baby will use a real mirror (the safe, babyproof kind) attached to the side of his crib as entertainment, even before he can move around. He'll happily look at the interesting image in the mirror long before he realizes he's looking at his own face.
This is only one of the many ways to stimulate your baby's vision. It's important because vision needs stimulation to gain focus and improve. Vision is the one sense that doesn't get a prenatal head start, and it arrives in a primitive state.
Each bit of early viewing experience helps shape your baby's observation skills, spatial perception, and hand-eye coordination. The more a baby sees that is geared to her stage of visual developmentfaces and bold contrasts early, details and color soon afterthe better she may be at things requiring visual ability later.
At 2 months, babies begin to detect differences among faces. But the most impressive change in a baby's vision at this time is her growing ability to detect detail. It's also at around 2 months that your baby's focus begins to shift from the edge of things to the interior. She looks at lips, at Dad's Sunday-morning stubble. By this age, your baby has learned to expect that the features of your face will move and react to her. When your face doesn't change, she may even fuss because she thinks you're ignoring her.
Just now she's focusing on that mobile you've hung over her crib, for example. Babies like to look at things that show distinct contrasts, like black and white, and at shapes like bull's-eyes, stripes, and circles. Your baby now looks at the mobile or the pictures over the changing table with increasing attention because she can see them better.
This isn't just idle looking; your baby's vision is stimulated by detail. Remember, though, that she'll be less interested inlook less atthe same mobile or picture after a while, which is a signal to you that she's ready for a change. Babies get bored with seeing the same thing all the time (except, of course, the people who love them). Like adults, they'll tune out the old until something new takes its place. For now, you are the manager of your baby's visual variety show.
Another marvelous development occurs in your baby's vision at about 2 to 3 months: His eyes are beginning to coordinate, to work together to move and focus simultaneously. Though his eyesight is still blurry, the images on his two retinas have merged into one three-dimensional picture. While he was able to track objects from birth, he did so jerkily. Now he can smoothly track an object that moves through a half circle in front of him.
This increase in coordination starts to give him the depth perception he needs to track objectsand youas they move toward or away from him. By 3 to 6 months, your baby will be able to anticipate an object's path as well as follow it. This means that when he sees you across the room, he knows to get excited because he expects you to move toward him.
Your baby's vision never functions in a vacuum; her motor development is keeping pace. So, by 3 months, she's got enough arm and hand control to bat at things she sees dangling above her or within her reach. Her aim isn't perfect, but she's trying. Though she was sensitive to the brightness or intensity of a color at 1 month, by 4 months she's responding to the full spectrum of colors.
Your baby's fuzzy world is fast gaining sharpness during these first three months. She's spent them close to you and is counting on that continuing. She'll never tire of seeing your familiar and reassuring face. So keep her close while you take her to see the wide world. For you, a change of scene is refreshing; for her, it's pure wonder.
