Your baby’s brain is being built... by you

by Dr Hannah Guzinska

The tiny, everyday moments are wiring up your baby’s brain to face the world and become the best version of themselves.

Picture the scene. Your baby is pulling themselves up on the coffee table, utterly determined. Once standing, they let go and a couple of wobbly seconds pass… before they land on their bottom. They look up at you. You smile and exclaim “you did it!”. They laugh and have another go. This, and the thousands of ordinary moments like it across a baby’s early life, are shaping their brain in extraordinary ways.

At birth, your baby’s brain is a work in progress — astonishing in its potential, and profoundly shaped by experience in the months and years that follow. Through repeated interactions across his or her early life, your baby learns what to expect from the world and relationships. In their brain, particular neural pathways get activated and strengthened by repeated use. That moment when your baby looks at you, they are reading your emotional response to understand whether they are safe, whether the wobble and fall was OK, whether to try again. Every time you respond with a calm, encouraging presence, you are shaping what your baby’s nervous system learns to expect. Those moments that look like nothing at all are actually teaching your baby that relationships are safe, that mistakes are ok, that exploration is worth it. 
​
The brain develops in a particular sequence, and the last part to develop is called the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This is the part of the brain responsible for managing our emotions, controlling our impulses, understanding and relating to other people, and solving problems, and it won’t fully mature until around 25 years of age. That’s why babies and children have a hard time managing big feelings by themselves, tolerating frustration, working out solutions. A baby who won’t be put down, toddlers throwing themselves on the floor of the supermarket, a child hitting out when something doesn’t go their way, all these behaviours make sense when you understand that they are simply the sign of a developing brain that can’t yet do what an adult brain can. 

So, parents need to scaffold the development of the skills of the PFC by doing these activities alongside their child – co-regulating (helping them to calm down) when they have big feelings, helping them make sense of the world and people around them, helping them with problem-solving. 

Now imagine your child, a few months later, trying to build a tower of blocks, which falls over. Your child dissolves into angry tears and hurls a block across the room. The part of the brain which would help them to think “that was frustrating; let me take a deep breath and try again” is not yet developed. That doesn’t mean you should allow the block throwing, but it changes how you respond. You’re not dealing with defiance or a “bad” child. You’re dealing with a brain that cannot yet do what you wish it could. You need to lend your child your prefrontal cortex. That means offering a grounded, steady, empathic presence. It might mean physical soothing in the form of a cuddle, understanding and accepting the big feelings (“that was frustrating when the tower fell over!”), managing the behaviour (“but I can’t let you throw blocks; that’s dangerous”) and, when your child is ready, supporting success (“let’s have a go at building the tower together”). 

Each time your child looks to you and finds a calm, warm face; each time you narrate their experience (“oops, the tower fell over, let’s try again”); each time you soothe a grazed knee or upset feelings; each time you make sense of what is going on inside for them — you are doing something called co-regulation. You are lending them your calm nervous system while theirs is still developing. Over time, with enough of these moments, your child begins to internalise that calm. This is how self-regulation is built: not by leaving children to manage alone, but by managing alongside them, thousands of times.

Importantly, you don’t need to get this right all the time; you just have to be present and responsive enough. Research has shown that not only is it inevitable that you will sometimes respond imperfectly; it is actually beneficial. The experience of things going slightly wrong – misreading a cue, expressing frustration, being distracted – followed by repair and reconnection, actually builds resilience in the developing brain. Through these moments of “rupture and repair” the child learns that things can go wrong and come right again. I am safe and loved even when things aren’t perfect. 

Let’s say that one day, when the block tower falls and the tears start, you feel your own frustration rise and your voice comes out sharper than you intended. That moment is repairable. Perhaps you take a deep breath, sit down on the floor with your child and offer to build the tower together. Perhaps you need longer to recover, and by the time you are regulated yourself more of an apology is needed: “I’m sorry I got cross”. When you reconnect and repair the rupture, whether that’s a gentle changing of course or an explicit apology, your child learns something profound: that relationships are messy but rewarding, that people make mistakes but can also make amends, that love doesn’t mean everything will always be perfect, but that ruptures will be repaired. They also learn that other people have their own needs and feelings, and develop a sense of themselves as their own independent person. 

When your baby falls down or knocks their tower over, they aren’t just learning how to walk or how to build, but learning about themselves, the world and other people. They are learning that they have agency, skill and resilience, what to expect in relationships, how to manage their feelings, and how to recover when things are messy or difficult. 

I hope that it feels empowering to know just how much all those seemingly endless and unimportant moments actually matter. Parents often talk about how they aren’t “achieving” anything when the laundry piles up and they can’t get to the gym and they haven’t spoken properly to their best friend for months. But actually, the answer to the question of “what did you do all day?” is: “I was building my baby’s brain”. 

FIND OUT MORE...
Dr Hannah Guzinska is a Clinical Psychologist and Edinburgh mum.
Her book, Coping with Early Parenting: The Magic and Mess of the First Few Years, explores the magic of how relationships shape developing brains — and the beautiful imperfection of doing that as
a real, fallible human parent.