Supporting your toddler’s development through responsive parenting
Supporting your toddler’s development through responsive parenting
First response
Guiding your toddler with love and positivity
It’s a difficult
Brighter futures start here
Discover more about infant development to help shape your baby's future
As a parent, it’s easy to identify our children’s physical needs – nutritious food, shelter, access to effective health services. But a child’s emotional needs, particularly in a young child or toddler, might not be as obvious as they are still learning how to communicate.
One of the most vital experiences in shaping a child’s developing brain is what’s known as ‘serve and return’ interaction between children and parents. Infants and toddlers naturally reach out for interaction through babbling, facial expressions, and gestures and adults respond with the same kind of gesturing back.1 This back-and-forth process is fundamental to the wiring of the brain, especially in the earliest years.
Responsive parenting encourages ‘serve and return’ interaction through the expression of warm and accepting behaviours to respond to children’s emotional signals.
This aspect of parenting helps us understand and better respond to our children’s needs and can have a significant influence on a young child’s health and development.2,3
What does responsive parenting involve?
Understanding our children’s needs can be a complicated process; one that often sees us closely observing and making sense of the signals our children are giving us through their behaviour. Responsive parenting involves us being more conscious and aware of our children to be able to learn what makes them tick – what makes them excited, engaged, angry or calm. It can take different forms depending on the situation, for
- Observation: Observing our children’s body language and cues, such as their actions and dialogue
- Interpretation: Interpreting these signals, for
example are they tired, or are they showing signs of feeling unwell? - Action: Acting quickly, consistently and efficiently to meet our children’s needs
Why is responsive parenting important?
Responsive parenting is immensely powerful, improving child health and development both in the short and long term, even at a genetic level. The genes our children inherit are not static or set in stone but are ‘expressed’ - activated or deactivated - by our children’s experiences. This
Positive experiences leave a chemical “signature” on the genes that activate a child’s genetic potential.4,5
School-age children whose mothers provided positive experiences early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress.6
Studies have also shown that maternal responsiveness has a protective effect on the development of low-birth-weight infants, decreasing problems such as social anxiety and depressive mood.7,8
Whilst responsive relationships are important to a child’s health and development, an absence of such parenting may have a negative impact, particularly in toddlers.
But from
Being consistently responsive and understanding our children’s
How can we maintain and improve our responsive interaction with our children?
Parenting is hard. Responsive parenting can be highly demanding and in some
An excellent example of this interaction is shared book reading. We may already undertake the routine of reading a book to our children before bed, but shared book reading can lead to other benefits.
Studies have examined the impact of teaching parents to use techniques that encourage young children to talk about illustrations and the book as a whole. These techniques and interactions had positive effects on children’s language, particularly for children at low risk for literacy problems.11,12
Next steps
- At times book reading will be a ‘bidirectional process’ where a conversation with our children will naturally unfold beyond the actual text. We can take advantage of this by simply allowing that conversation to take place and responding to our children’s remarks, reactions, questions and perhaps expanding on some of them
- When reading to our toddlers, without being a pushy school teacher, we can encourage them to identify pictures or words as we
read, or have them read words with us. - Not too many questions. While stopping occasionally to ask questions about the story it's important not to interrupt the flow in order to allow our children to develop sustained attention.
- Our children pick up on our reactions to what is being read. So, if we can immerse ourselves in the story, enjoy the book and the uninterrupted time with our children they are more likely to enjoy the story and reading in general. Reading shouldn't be merely a form of home education. Our enthusiasm for the book counts.
- Sometimes our children may simply want to hear our voice reading them a story because they are genuinely interested in the story, but they also find us and our voice comforting and reassuring. In this
case there’s no need to push them for ongoing interaction.
Conclusion:
The relationships we establish with our children provide the basis for their social and emotional development. Early parent-child relationships also set the stage for our children’s emotional well-being and social relationships in later stages of life. Having such an early impact on the future development of our children underscores why a lack of responsiveness can be unfavourable in the earliest years of life. Recognising the importance of responsive parenting and where needed, offering effective interventions, are likely to result in better long-term outcomes in emotional well-being, learning, health, and parenting of the next generation.1
Written by: Dr Aric Sigman
Dr Aric Sigman lectures in child health education and publishes
papers on child health and development subjects He is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Biology and an Associate Fellow of the British
Psychological Society. Dr Sigman has twice been invited to address
the European Parliament Working Group on the Quality of
Childhood in the European Union
Last reviewed: 30th June 2016
Get in touch with our Careline experts
Our midwives, nutritionists and feeding advisors are always on hand to talk about feeding your baby. Need instant assistance? Our WhatsApp Customer Support team is here to help on-the-go!