What Do Babies Know?

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relationship with its mother. (And/or its father, and/or what the linguistically liberated call the "caregiver.") She must not only feed it, and love it, but endlessly talk to it, play games with it, show it what is happening in the world. Rutgers' Lewis has tested 100 babies for mental development at three months and recorded their mothers' response to the infants' signs of distress. He was hardly surprised to find that those who had been more warmly cared for had learned more by the time they were retested at the age of one year. This kind of nurturing is essential to both emotional and intellectual growth; indeed, the two are inseparable. "The baby who doesn't smile may be giving us a more reliable indicator than cognitive tests," says Psychiatrist Eleanor Galenson of Manhattan's Mount Sinai Medical Center.

The baby's smile is also a kind of judgment on the care that its mother has been providing. "All these new data about how early the baby can distinguish things should upgrade motherhood, restore some prestige to it," says Dr. Benjamin Spock, 80, who taught a benign form of child rearing to a whole generation of Americans. "Motherhood has had an ever reduced amount of importance placed on it in our strange, overly intellectualized, overly scientific society."

According to traditional wisdom, all mothers know instinctively how to rear their children, but unfortunately that is not always true. Indeed, the instinct has been vehemently denied by Elisabeth Badinter, the French philosophy professor who wrote Mother Love: Myth and Reality. But even if a mother's nurturing is an instinct, it requires some experience as well, and if the ability is entirely a learned trait, it is sometimes none too well learned. To check on how consciously mothers interact with their babies, Psychiatrist Daniel Stern of the Cornell University Medical Center has been observing nearly 100 mothers playing with infants eight to twelve months old. "Whenever we notice that the baby has put on an emotional expression that the mother has seen, we look at how she responded to it," says Stern. "Then we ask her why she did it, what she thought the baby was feeling, what she expected to accomplish, and whether she knew what she was doing at the time." His preliminary findings: about one-third of the mothers were fully aware of what Stern calls the attunement with their infants, another third were quite unaware of it, and the rest were essentially unaware but could recall it when it was pointed out to them.

This extremely important emotional interplay, often described as "bonding," is a combination of love and play, but it is now seen as something else, a kind of wordless dialogue. The baby not only understands what the mother is communicating, or not communicating, but it is trying to tell her things, if she will only listen. Says Dr. Bennett Leventhal of the University of Chicago's Child Psychiatry Clinic: "We now know that babies send messages very early. In their first year of life, they are good students. They are also very good teachers, but they have to have someone to interact with them. There are sometimes very competent babies with very incompetent parents."

Many psychologists believe the new research enables them to anticipate future problems in even the youngest children.