Vision

During the first week of life, your baby can focus on your face, making it the first image in his visual memory. He will gaze at your face and look into your eyes. Eye contact is an important form of communication that will aid your baby’s growth and development. It is one of the first ways he can reliably make contact with you, and it provides a way for you and your baby to begin making emotional contact, known as bonding. Because of sensitivity to bright lights in the first few days after birth, your baby will most likely close his eyes during the day, even when awake. He or she will prefer dim lighting because the pigmentation, or color, of his iris, the part of the eye that regulates the amount of light that enters, is not fully developed. Your baby will blink at bright lights, such as camera flashes, but may also gaze momentarily at certain bright lights or bright objects.

The Baby Chronicles

For the last couple of years (okay for the last few years), Babs and I have been working on a newsletter about children's first year of life. We have a free sample of the newsletter that focuses on the first week of development. Future installments will be 8 pages long and available for a small fee. We'll focus on language, social interaction, brain and cognitive development, motor skills, vision and hearing month by month. We'll let you know as we start to post them to the site. Read the sample and let us know what you think.

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