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Social & Emotional Development
Developing Self-Awareness
WiseTip: SE-AWA-M0009-P01B

Play games involving mutual imitation and turn-taking and that encourage face-to-face contact. Encourage your baby to imitate your sounds or hand movements.

1, 2

  1. New Jersey Council for Young Children. (2013). New Jersey Birth to Three Early Learning Standards. Retrieved from: https://www.nj.gov/education/ece/guide/standards/birth/standard s.pdf

  2. Asendorpf, J. B., & Baudonniere, P. (1993). Self-awareness and otherawareness: Mirror self-recognition and synchronic imitation among unfamiliar peers. Developmental Psychology, 29, 88–93.

0-9 months
Play
WHY IT MATTERS

Calling your baby's name helps your baby develop self-awareness as a being who is separate from the people in the environment. Research on one to two-month-old babies showed that infants begin to manifest a clear sense of their agency in the world at around two months of age. Babies could start to control how strongly they sucked at a bottle to get what they wanted instead of allowing external factors to influence the process.

This stage is known as the

intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity - Intersubjectivity, the process whereby two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding.4 Intersubjectivity promotes a common ground for communication, where one adjusts to the other person’s perspective. The capacity for intersubjectivity is present in parent-infant mutual gaze, exchange of vocal and emotional signals, imitation, and joint play with objects, and in toddlers’ capacity to infer others’ intentions.5, 6

4. Newson, J., & Newson, E. (1975). Intersubjectivity and the transmission of culture: On the social origins of symbolic functioning. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 24, 437-446.

5. Csibra, G. (2010). Recognizing Communicative Intentions in Infancy. Mind & Language, 25(2), 141-168. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2009.01384.x

6. Feldman, R. (2007). Parent-infant synchrony and the construction of shared timing; physiological precursors, developmental outcomes, and risk conditions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 48(3-4), 329-354. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2006.01701.x

stage, where babies begin to understand that they are separate persons from people in the environment. With that awareness, babies will initiate interactions and respond to others. Calling babies by their names helps build self-awareness and facilitates babies’ initiating and responding when interacting with others.
1, 2

  1. Rochat, P., & Striano, T. (1999). Social cognitive development in the first year. In P. Rochat (Ed.) Early Social Cognition, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 3-34.

  2. Rochat, P. (2001). Origins of self-concept. In G. Bremner & A. Fogel (Eds.), Handbooks of developmental psychology. Blackwell handbook of infant development (pp. 191-212). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Young children develop self-awareness when they have social interaction with adults.

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  1. McMullen, M. B., & Dixon, S. (2009). In support of a relationship-based approach to practice with infants and toddlers in the United States. In Brownlee, J. (Ed.). Participatory learning and the early years (pp. 109-128). London: Routledge.
For example, when parents interact with their babies and acknowledge their responses by smiling back or expressing happiness when children smile, babies learn that their presence is affirmed.
4
  1. Kärtner, J. (2015). The Autonomous Developmental Pathway: The Primacy of Subjective Mental States for Human Behaviour and Experience. Child Development, 86(4), 1298–1309.