Raising Children Network: the Australian parenting website
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Playing with newborns

By Raising Children Network
 
 

Entertaining your newborn is as simple as making faces at her, singing nursery rhymes, smiling and blowing raspberries. Playing together will bring you closer and helps your baby learn about the world.

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  • The brain develops at an amazing rate during the first three years.
  • Play stimulates ideas and changes in the brain that help your baby develop and find out about the world. 
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Playing together is easy, it's enjoyable, and it's one of the best ways for you and your newborn to get to know each other. All you need to get started is you and your newborn.

Playing together helps you and your baby get to know each other. Through playing, you learn to trust and depend on each other, and the bond between you deepens. Research shows that playing together helps your newborn feel loved and secure, and feeling loved and secure helps babies to develop and learn.  

Play stimulates new ideas and helps your baby's brain to develop. Each new experience that your baby is exposed to helps parts of her brain link together, grow and develop. She learns more and more about the world around her, and about where she fits into the world.
 
Playing with your baby will help her learn to talk and understand words. Even if you don't always have time to stop everything and play, you can chat to your newborn about whatever is going on – cooking dinner, shopping, getting the bath ready and just about anything else that you're doing. Singing to your child has the same benefits.
 
Play can reveal a lot about your baby's personality. Rough and silly or quiet and calm, you'll soon know what style your baby prefers. Follow her cues – if she seems startled or upset, tone down the game.

Ideas for playing with your baby

 

  • Make faces, smile, laugh, roll your eyes, wave your hands gently – your newborn is the one person who will be fascinated by everything you do. She even wants to try to be just like you.

  • Give baby all kinds of objects to feel – soft toys or a rattle are great fun, and so are different textures. Your baby learns by touching and feeling things, and this all helps her to find out more about her world.

  • Give baby different things to look at – outside, inside, different people, different rooms. Some tummy time each day lets your baby study what for her are eye-popping new sights like the side of a chair from different perspectives. This doubles as a way of helping your baby to hold her head up, and gives her time to try this each day. It's not recommended that your baby fall asleep on her tummy though, so put her to bed in a safe sleeping position if you start to see signs of tiredness.

Sing, chat, blow raspberries – the game doesn’t have to be complicated. The simpler the better for a newborn.
 
  • Last reviewed11-05-2006
  • References

    Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss, Vol 1: Attachment, 2nd Ed. New York: Basic Books.

    Manning-Morton, J. & Thorp, M. (2003). Key times for play: The first three years. Philadelphia: Open University Press.