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Children's Unspoken Language
By Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon
influences from very early in life, almost as soon as babies begin to establish mutual eye contact with their caregivers. While babies look at faces from birth, they don't sustain mutual eye contact until they are about 2 to 3 weeks old. Delay in beginning to make mutual eye contact can sometimes be indicative of social and/or intellectual retardation.
One study found that babies who did not make mutual eye contact with their caregivers in their first month of life had rather different patterns of subsequent development compared with those who did. For example, early "non-gazers" generally showed developmental delay and had more behavioral problems at age 6 years than those who did engage in early mutual gaze (Keller and Zach 1993). It is difficult to tell whether the non-gazing reflected an underlying problem that was also associated with the problems that emerged later. Alternatively dysfunctional gazing behavior may have got these infants off to the wrong start with their caregivers resulting in less than optimal patterns of interactions and potential learning experiences.
Mutual gaze is experienced as very rewarding by caregivers, and the special feeling it evokes plays an important part in early parent-infant bonding. For many parents making mutual eye contact with their baby is their first "meeting of minds." Interestingly the same emotive import is not given to early mutual gaze in all cultures. In some societies infants are not attributed mental states until they are much older, and little significance is placed on their early nonverbal behaviors. Indeed there are individual differences within any culture in terms of what sort of mental abilities are assumed in infants. This has been called maternal "mind-mindedness" (Meins, 1998).
Mothers who are high on mind-mindedness consider their infants to be intentional, thinking people from very early, and they treat them as such. This influences a number of aspects of development. For example, mothers who are "mind-minded" typically have babies who are securely attached to them.