At months old, a baby can begin to visually follow your face where it reappears. Like with all milestones, expected ages are just averages and guidelines to give you a general idea, not a rule. It becomes more of a cause for concern when months and months beyond the milestone guideline age pass and the baby is still not showing any interest. Babies all develop on their own time but discuss any missed milestones like this with your pediatrician.
Unlike a physical milestone like walking, laughing is about personality, and some kids are naturally serious. Some babies may never show interest in peekaboo just because they prefer other games and that can be chalked up to individuality.
Not playing peekaboo on its own cannot lead to any diagnosis without other contributing factors. If you have any cause for concern, always consult your pediatrician. Why should babies play peekaboo? Babies gain a lot from the seemingly simple game: Visual stimulation creates new brain cell connections, and the repetition strengthens them.
And again. Peekaboo never gets old. Not only does my own infant daughter seem happy to do it for hours, but when I was young I played it with my mum "you chuckled a lot! We are all born with unique personalities, in unique situations and with unique genes.
So why is it that babies across the world are constantly rediscovering peekaboo for themselves? Babies don't read books, and they don't know that many people, so the surprising durability and cultural universality of peekaboo is perhaps a clue that it taps into something fundamental in their minds.
No mere habit or fashion, the game can help show us the foundations on which adult human thought is built. An early theory of why babies enjoy peekaboo is that they are surprised when things come back after being out of sight. This may not sound like a good basis for laughs to you or I, with our adult brains, but to appreciate the joke you have to realise that for a baby, nothing is given.
They are born into a buzzing confusion, and gradually have to learn to make sense of what is happening around them. You know that when you hear my voice, I'm usually not far behind, or that when a ball rolls behind a sofa it still exists, but think for a moment how you came by this certainty. The Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called this principle 'object permanence' and suggested that babies spent the first two years of their lives working it out.
And of course those two years are prime peekaboo time. Throughout this period the basic elements of the game remain the same. It is all about eye contact — which is pure social interaction, stripped down to its barest elements. Are you attending to me?
Peekaboo gives babies what they want more than anything: adult attention. It allows them to learn about the most confusing and compelling mystery in their world: other people. The psychologist Rana Esseily and her colleagues at the University of Paris found that babies learn better with a jokey as opposed to serious play partner. I suspect that the converse is also true, that mirthful babies encourage adults to teach them things they are interested in.
What is less obvious is that baby laughter is the opposite: babies laugh when they want you to continue to interact with them. That way, they learn more. Critically, it seems as though infants can spot the difference between joking, pretending and being literal.
Elena Hoicka, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield, has demonstrated that this ability emerges before children are two years old. At two, they invent their own. The psychologists Vasu Reddy at the University of Portsmouth and Gina Mireault at Johnson State College in Vermont have recently speculated that this transition to overt clowning is an important marker of the awareness of other minds. It also coincides with the inexhaustible energy of toddlerhood, which, for parents, can make the joke wear thin.
Paradoxically, the best way to make a baby laugh is to take her seriously. The psychologist Robert Provine at the University of Maryland in Baltimore has shown that the majority of laughter in everyday life is not associated with jokes but with social graces and group cohesion.
Recent investigations in my own lab suggest that such behaviour starts early.
0コメント