The Beginning of Parent-Infant Communication

Abstract

This chapter presents the seminal work of researchers who, starting in the 1960s, carefully described the earliest social interactions between infants and parents through detailed microanalytic observation. We highlight some of the features of parent-infant social interaction that continue to be studied by researchers today and that provide important insight both for theories of how the human mind develops and for clinical practice with infants. The research we report in this chapter proposes that social interaction is possible from the first moments of life, that infants initiate and actively shape their encounters with caregivers, and that repeated encounters foster lasting relational patterns that prepare the infant mind for culture and language. Temporally organized expressive behavior and interpersonal temporal coordination appear as the foundations for early social interaction, enabling turn-taking, imitation, and affect matching. We propose that social interaction between parents and infants is not merely a bidirectional transfer of information or emotion but rather that, because it is embedded in meaningful and meaning-making situations, it is itself a form of communication.