An essential thing to know is that infants are highly responsive to the emotions and social interaction they get from the world around them. They seek connection, engagement, and responses from their caregivers.
They can also get stressed and the signs to look out for are:
- Over-/Under respond to things around them
- Unexplained changes in sleeping/feeding habits
- More irritable (e.g. cries more than usual)
- Stomach ache / headache
What can we do to reduce the stress?
- Interaction (e.g. smile, facial expression, tone of voice, singing and making eye contact)
- Quicker response to their needs
- Show lots of love and attention
- Offer physical attention (hug)
- Take good care of yourself too (they can feel your stress)
An experiment showed that an infant appeared stressed and showed negative emotions when not getting the expected reaction from the caregiver. This tells us that we cannot underestimate the influence of the relationship between infant and caregiver, as well as showing love and attention from the caregiver. This is the video of the ‘still face experiment’ by Dr. Edward Tronick: https://buff.ly/3UmjW07