Transcript: Is Your Infant Talking? 4 Cues That Build Early Connection

This is a text transcript from The First Time Mum’s Chat podcast. The episode is called Toddler Bedtime Battles? Steal These 4 Must-Try Sleep Strategies Tonight! and you can click on the link to view the full episode page, listen to the episode and view the show notes.

Helen Thompson: Hi, I’m Helen, a qualified childcare educator and baby massage instructor, and this is First Time Mum’s Chat, the podcast that supports you as you navigate the rollercoaster of early motherhood. If you are a new mom who’s recently given birth and wondering how on earth you’re meant to know what your baby is trying to tell you, then you are in the right place.

Each episode I share practical, nurturing advice to help you better understand your baby, build confidence, and create a more peaceful, connected start to your parenting journey. And this episode is something truly special. As we conclude our enlightening series on early communication, we’ve journeyed through the incredible way babies connect with us long before they utter their first words.

To bring this series to a meaningful close, I’m joined by Ann McKitrick, host of the Parenting in the First 3 Years podcast. With over 30 years of experience as a child development professor, parenting coach and educator, Ann has devoted her life unlocking the secrets of early parent child connection.

Her work has helped thousands of parents like you learn how to respond to their baby’s cues and build stronger, more intuitive bonds. Here’s a question I know many new moms are asking. Can my baby really communicate with me, even before they can speak? You’ll hear Ann soothed a traumatized foster baby every single time with one unexpected song. A moment that will stay with you and you’ll learn how you can tune into your baby’s gaze, scent, cries, and body language to create that same deep connection.

In today’s episode, we’ll explore the incredible role of oxytocin and how your baby’s scent can actually deepen your bond. How simple eye contact and physical closeness build emotional security, the powerful unspoken language of touch and how it supports your baby’s emotional and brain development.

So whether you are feeding at 3:00 AM or walking bub around the block, pop in your earbud because this conversation could change the way you see and connect with your baby forever. Let’s dive in.

Welcome Ann to First Time Mum’s Chat. I’m delighted to have you here.

Ann McKitrick: Thank you. I am so happy to be with you.

Helen Thompson: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Ann McKitrick: So we have three kids of our own. We fostered five babies, for short periods of time. Usually babies would get placed out pretty quickly, but we did have a few that stayed with us for a little while and I’ll probably talk a little bit about them as I go. I have a very keen interest in infants and I love to watch them and learn from them and watch people’s response to them. I think it’s really, really interesting just the way that we are with babies and so yeah, that’s just a little bit about me.

Helen Thompson: So Ann, with your extensive background in early childhood development, what inspired you to focus on the subtle aspects of infant communication, particularly the unspoken cues like gaze and touch?

Ann McKitrick: Sure, I think probably an interesting thing to add here is that not only have I taught prenatal and infant development and child growth and development courses for many years I just love babies and have always taken a special interest. Like if I’m gonna read something or watch a video, it’s usually something that has to do with child development and infants particularly.

Helen Thompson: So what inspired you to start your work with infants?

Ann McKitrick: You know, I started out as an infant teacher in a college program that’s kind of like a demonstration school where students would come and learn child development and teaching techniques from us as the people who were caring for children of student families. So I started that job as a young woman who wasn’t married or had children yet.

I was just somebody who really loved babies at that point, and had this great job of taking care of eight babies all day long, every day. That’s really where I got the best experience and the best preparation for this, even though I had studied child development and done all the reading, it takes the hands-on work to really learn, what children are doing and how we can respond to them.

So, yeah, I think that what inspired me basically was my mom. I can remember I was the fourth of five kids in our family. My older siblings, they married and had their children, and we would get the babies at our house sometimes while they babysat or whatever and we would be so excited when they would wake up from their nap and because they were awake and we could play with them. That was just kind of what we did at our house.

Helen Thompson: Oh, I can understand that. I think babies have so much to give and I think a lot of parents don’t connect to that.

Ann McKitrick: Yeah.

Helen Thompson: So eye contact plays such a powerful role in early childhood, particularly in babies and their site and their development. So in your experience, what are some of the nonverbal cues you’ve noticed in babies and what have you found that really works when responding to them?

Ann McKitrick: Oh gosh, I think that nonverbal cues would be kind of the grimaces and facial expressions that they give us. Of course there’s all of the reflexive behaviors like rooting and opening their mouth and just even, not with newborns so much, but the snuggling that a baby will do, a little bit later on when they feel very safe with you.

I think that the nonverbal cues are the squeaks, the noises, the tone of the cry, the volume of the cry, the cadence of the cry. All of those things are communicating and you have to learn that. I mentioned that we had these foster babies and sometimes, you would get a baby, and what I figured out is it took three all nights. I would take it all, even though we had a busy life and three kids and stuff. For the first three to five nights, it was only me, all night long with that baby, responding to their cries, learning their cues, learning their rhythms and their cadences and how did they let me know that they were hungry, how did they let me know they needed a burp, had a diaper that needed changing. How did they communicate those things and you learn that by observing them and watching them and knowing what is their content state? What is their, ‘ I need something’ state and what’s their agitated state?

Then watching them so much that you kind of catch it before it happens and that way they don’t have to cry to communicate. It becomes a dance or a cadence of care when you are attuned to your baby like that. That attunement is what develops this attachment, which is so vitally important in the first weeks when babies are getting used to life outside the womb.

Helen Thompson: Have you ever heard of Priscilla Dunstan? She’s a pediatrician who’s done some fascinating research on baby nonverbal cues and crying sounds, and she was featured on Oprah Winfrey. She actually discovered there are certain sounds that babies use when they’re hungry and when they’re distressed or have got colic or tummy problems.

She actually did find out that there are certain sounds that babies use when they’re hungry, like, nah. Nah. Is, and the eh sound is when they’re thinking, oh, I’ve just done a and then, eh, eh, it is when they need a burp. It’s really interesting, as you say, to listen to those cries because you really hear them if you listen.

Ann McKitrick: That’s really fascinating work, isn’t it, that someone was able to identify that!

Helen Thompson: I’d love to hear your thoughts on other simple ways parents can engage their little ones through senses. Touch is particularly important in my work ’cause I do baby massage, but there are so many other senses out there that I think people don’t connect with, with babies.

Ann McKitrick: I think that one of the things that is really important, even with a brand new baby is the way that we speak to them and the way that we respond to their little noises that they will begin to make. The thing that’s fascinating about newborns is they come into the world ready to listen to you.

They’ve already been listening to you. They’ve been listening to of course your voice, but all of the voices around you. I remember one time I went to visit someone who had just had a baby in the hospital and, so they said, you wanna hold him and I said, yeah, I’d love to. So I’m holding this baby and this newborn just starts crying and I said, oh, I think she needs to hear your voice and I gave the baby back to the mom and she spoke to her and the baby just stopped crying immediately and dad was sitting there and he was just bewildered like, how did you know and how did that happen?

It was just a really beautiful example of how equipped a baby is to attach to this mother or to be comforted by the mother and the father and anyone who’s been talking to that belly throughout, especially the last couple of months of pregnancy. Beyond that, beyond the sound and the cadence of the voice, they are equipped to take in language and make sense of it even at hours of age. There’s some really interesting research that looks at baby’s response to different words, and they will respond to words that matter, like nouns, and verbs, and they will not respond to words that don’t matter, like prepositions in transitional language. So they’re ready to hear all those nuances of all of the different languages all over the world.

So I think that sense of hearing is one that is really important and we need to kind of honor that and watch the loud noises and be very gentle and soft with babies. I think that’s a really interesting one is how equipped they are for language.

Helen Thompson: I think that is a very interesting one because I actually observed once a grandmother interacting with her granddaughter. She was just telling her granddaughter a story. She wasn’t doing anything magical, she was just communicating with her granddaughter as she would with anybody, and she was talking as an adult would talk to an adult telling her a story. It was just amazing how the baby was just gazing at her grandmother and making these sounds and these nonverbal cues. Just the way she was looking, the gaze when she was looking at her, and I was just in awe. I just took a step back and just watched. It was such a beautiful connection and it was just lovely. The baby was obviously really in tune to grandma, and grandma was really in tune to the baby, and it was just a really, really beautiful, beautiful experience to observe.

Ann McKitrick: Yeah, that gaze is so important on both ends and when a baby gazes at your face, you just can’t look away. You have to look back at them and you have to connect with them and that is what forms that attachment and that trust and yeah, that the gaze is really, really important.

Helen Thompson: So, just a bit of humor. What’s one of the funniest or most unexpected things you’ve seen a newborn do?

Ann McKitrick: Well, that’s a really great question. I don’t know how funny this is, but I think that this is something that was very remarkable to me and really stood out to me with one of our babies that we had. We got him and he was six weeks old and he was very injured. He was really, really injured and he was in a lot of pain and he would cry and I have this red rocking chair in the family room and that I would just try so hard to soothe this little baby and without hurting him as I held him and stuff ’cause he was so physically abused. But anyways, all that to say, I was trying all my best tricks I could not get him to cry.

I just remembered this song, it’s a John Lennon song called ‘Beautiful Boy’, and I started singing that song to him and it’s got a real nice rhythm to it. I was just singing to him, you are a beautiful boy. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy and when I did that he stopped crying.

Every single time that I would sing that song, that baby would stop crying. He’s grown and gone. He left our house after about 15 months of care, which was great because we got the chance to really give him a good, solid attachment and trust of being cared for before he went on to some family members. He’s the same age as one of my nephews and so I always know how old this kid is based on the age of my nephew. I know he is in his twenties now or just turned 20, I should say. I always have this feeling in my heart that when he hears that John Lennon song, if he ever does, that it will trigger some sort of warm feeling inside of him

Helen Thompson: Hmm.

Ann McKitrick: from his first year that would give him some peace and joy. That was probably one of the most remarkable things I have experienced with a baby.

Helen Thompson: Oh, I think that’s lovely. I think that’s beautiful. Babies hear a lot more than we think. They understand a lot more than we think, and that’s where all this communication comes from. If we’re always talking and communicating to our babies, they’re picking up and it’s developing their brains and it’s supporting all those pathways in the brain. So, yeah, the more we talk to our babies, the better.

Ann McKitrick: Right, right, which kind of leads to the advice that I would give, and that would be to take care of yourself so you can do that well. Try to do some care for yourself, and get the help that you need so that you can respond in these ways that will be nurturing for your baby. Every new parent really needs support and they need people to help ’em out.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I think that’s very true. People always are talking about the role of oxytocin and bonding. Baby Massage promotes that, it gives them that feel good hormone which reinforces what you’re talking about with attachment. So, I often call oxytocin the cuddle hormone, I know it’s the love hormone, but I love calling it the cuddle hormone ’cause that’s exactly what you’re doing.

I’m curious about your thoughts on a newborn’s scent and how it connects to bonding. On how it connects to the scent and to the smell, that lovely baby smell?

Ann McKitrick: Right, yeah, I think it’s really interesting. I have done a little bit of reading on oxytocin just recently, and they were talking about how It clears the pathways in the brain for the parts of the brain that develop trust and empathy and emotional regulation. So it goes both ways, right? Whoever is holding this baby is also smelling and getting all of these great feel-good hormones. It reduces stress on both sides. It helps both people, the baby and the caregiver to relax, to settle in.

You can just feel it when you’re holding a baby and they relax and they just almost mold to your body and that’s, I think, a really beautiful way of describing what happens with that. You get melded together that’s a really cool thing.

Now there’s some really interesting research around smells and the ability to identify a smell. Everybody has their own smell and new babies have their own particular smell, it comes from their amniotic fluid. Parents including the father and the mother are able to identify their own baby when given several different diapers with some amniotic fluid on it. They can tell which one is their own baby. That’s how attuned we are by smell, through smell with our own child. That is really another one of those beautiful things about the parent child or the caregiver child relationship, because it doesn’t have to necessarily be the parent.

Helen Thompson: I’ve just described all these wonderful things I’ve experienced with foster children. Those are not my children but I still was able to get that same kind of bonding and attachment with them by being very observant of them and caring for ’em.

Do you think babies also have that sense of smell to their parents? You say it’s from the parents side, but I’m sure that babies have that sense of smell to their parents. Like you mentioned, some mothers just talk to their baby and they immediately stop crying.

Helen Thompson: Maybe they’re also sensing that smell as well as their voice and as well as her touch and as well as her communication, they sense, oh, this is my mom, this is somebody who loves me, so she’s going to gaze at me and have that beautiful gazing, so I’m gonna stop crying because they sense the smell as well.

Ann McKitrick: Yeah and I’m sure you’ve heard people say that, when you pick up your child, even if it’s not time to eat, when they smell the milk, they’ll root. So that’s a really good example of how infants do smell their mother and know that it’s her.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I wonder what happens if they’re not breastfed. If they’re not breastfed, they don’t smell that milk as much.

Ann McKitrick: Mm-hmm.

Helen Thompson: They probably, as soon as they see the bottle, they sense that from the sight and the seeing. You’d probably know more about this than I do. I think if babies, is it up to about two months or three months that they just see black and white?

Ann McKitrick: You know, I don’t know how anybody knows what a baby is seeing as far as colors, but I think that what the main thing that they like is the contrast and the black and white gives you such a great contrast.

Helen Thompson: Yeah.

Ann McKitrick: Not necessarily that black and white are magical colors, but mostly it’s that there’s such a great contrast and their vision is very limited and it’s right at about 12 inches initially and then it gets further and further out, and that’s when they become more aware of the world around them because it begins to be more clear when they are able to look across the room and actually see a little bit better.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I was just curious, I’ve just been learning about that a lot myself recently, and I was just curious to what your thoughts were.

Ann McKitrick: The other day, a young mom came over to my house and she brought her four month old baby, and typically a four month old will pretty much go to anybody, right? They haven’t gotten that whole cognitive switch where they’re aware of who their people are and who their people aren’t. They’ll usually go to most adults, but this baby, she won’t go to anybody. She’s very, very attached to her mother and her mom’s fine with it. She goes, she’s just a mama’s girl and she’s not really too content if anybody else holds her. So that kind of breaks that theory of babies will go to most anybody while they’re really young. So every child is individual, that’s why we have to observe them so closely like I started out saying. Understanding the nuances of each baby, just like you get to know a new friend or a new person that comes into your family. We have to learn each other and that’s part of this learning process.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, that brings me to an episode you did on your podcast called ‘ Three Amazing Things About Newborns That nobody Knows’. You debunk several common myths about newborns. Could you share some of those misconceptions with our listeners and explain the truth behind them.

Ann McKitrick: Yeah, well one of the things that sometimes you hear folks say is that you shouldn’t hold a baby all the time because then they will expect to be held all the time and and you’ll spoil them. So, when you hold your child, when you pick them up, when they cry, when you respond to them and you are responsive, you are meeting very essential emotional needs and being held makes a child feel very safe.

When they cry and you come and pick them up and you hold them, then you are communicating to them, I see you, I hear you, I’m gonna respond to you, and I’m gonna take care of you, I’m gonna keep you safe. If you hear them crying and you say, well, I just put him down a few minutes ago, I need for him to learn to be okay without me, then what you’re communicating is, she’s not gonna always come when I cry. So I actually have a story about that. I had one foster baby who came, she was five months old and she did not cry.

Helen Thompson: Really, wow!

Ann McKitrick: We had to teach her to cry because she had learned in her very young, little bitty life that it didn’t always help for me to cry. It didn’t mean anybody would actually come. So she learned to conserve her own energy by not crying and not communicating. So we had to kind of teach her how to cry. We had to teach her how to communicate with us by responding to every little noise that she made, and she did learn how to cry really beautifully.

She learned how to communicate and and she was good. If the only way that you can communicate is to cry and you cry and nobody comes, or they say, you need to wait, then you can only imagine with that how scary that must feel. So that’s the first one, that picking them up too much will spoil them. You really can’t spoil a child.

Helen Thompson: I definitely agree.

Ann McKitrick: Yeah, not till, long after, six to eight, 12 months, that first year is really, really important.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I’ve heard that in orphanages. You hear of babies, small babies in orphanages, and you see them in cots and they’re just crying and crying and nobody responds and they just pull into themselves and I just think that’s so sad. Babies cry for a reason.

Ann McKitrick: It’s the only way they can let you know.

Helen Thompson: They’re not crying to be difficult, they’re not crying to annoy you that’s interesting how you actually resolved it too, by teaching her to cry. Every sound that she made you responded to!

Ann McKitrick: Yeah another one is that you know, that we want babies to sleep through the night as quick as they can. The real truth of that one is that you’re gonna sleep well when you’re satiated and baby’s stomach is about as big as their little fist, and that little fist can probably hold about a tablespoon, maybe two tablespoons of milk in those first weeks. That is not enough calories for them to get a good long sleep in. They have to refuel their little bodies all the time, about every two to three hours, to get the calories in that they need to grow. That’s why you see all this concentration on weight, especially in those first weeks. That’s what lets us know how a kid’s doing is, how’s their weight, how many ounces have they gained, how many have they lost, all of that stuff. So it’s just really important to understand that it’s not even necessarily expected for children to sleep through the night until well after six months. I think the average age would be around nine months. So we just have to say, okay, this is my life, I’m going to be up every few hours for a little while, and it’s not gonna be forever. You will get some rest later on, but for now, you gotta prepare yourself physically and mentally and emotionally to have interrupted sleep.

I think the pregnancy itself kind of prepares you for this because in the last month it seems like you can’t get through the night anyways. It’s almost as if there’s some sort of preparation for this interrupted thing and learning how to find some rest in other times of the day. So I think frequent waking is very normal and it’s necessary for their growth and development, that’s the truth of it.

Another myth might be that we need to put newborns on a schedule. It’s an interesting thing. It seems as if many times babies have their days and nights upside down and that’s just kind of a transition period. If you think about how they are in the womb, it’s the same. Darkness all the time, and you’re being fed constantly. So they have to figure out how to recognize hunger and communicate hunger and then they have to learn how to suck. They have to learn how to do all these bodily functions. They have to learn how to sleep outside the womb.

All of these things, it’s a learning experience for them. It just stands to reason that they don’t know the difference between night and day. So we just wanna do that by allowing them to experience natural light during the day and and kind of get that circadian rhythm synced up with the actual day and it does happen. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, but those kind of scheduling kinds of things, there’s different schools of thought on it and that’s really up to the individual parent. I think that you could read the research on both sides of it and say, that’s good, that’s good and it’s all fine. So long as the child is getting the rest they need, the calories they need, the sleep, the interactions that they need. How you have that managed in your own head. I don’t know that it matters too much, so long as the baby’s having their needs met.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, every baby’s different, and we’re all learning. The mother’s learning how to adjust to their new baby and the baby, as you say, has got a lot to learn in that four or five months. I think a myth is that we expect too much of these little babies. We expect them to come outta the womb, all ready to go, expect them to sleep, expect them to feed, expect them not to wake you up in the night. As you say, they’re learning so much and they’re growing so much in that short period of time.

They’re learning how to kick their legs, they’re learning how to smile at you, they’re learning how to gaze at you. All this is their way of communicating and I think that brings an end to all the things I’ve been talking about with communication with you and in my last podcast. It’s all about communicating with each other. Mother communicating with baby, childcarer communicating with baby, father communicating with baby and baby most importantly communicating with mother and father. All these things, the gazing, the bonding, the oxytocin and the touch and the smell, all of these are part of communication and I think those things together are so powerful.

Ann McKitrick: Yeah, it’s an amazing thing. How beautifully equipped they come into the world, you know?

Helen Thompson: Yeah, so before we wrap up, can you let our listeners know where they can find you and learn more about your wonderful work?

Ann McKitrick: Yeah, you can find me at nurturednoggins.com, Nurtured Noggins, and if you wanna email me, you can email me at ann@nurturednoggins.com. I’d love to talk with anybody who wants to talk babies. That’s always fun.

Helen Thompson: And do you have an Instagram account?

Ann McKitrick: Uhhuh, it’s Nurtured Noggins.

Helen Thompson: Okay. Well thank you for being here. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. I always love talking to people about babies and communication because I think it’s so, so powerful. So thank you for being here, Ann it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Ann McKitrick: You are so welcome. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for having me.

Helen Thompson: Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of First Time Mom’s Chat, and a big heartfelt thank you to Anne McKitrick for such a beautiful and insightful conversation. I hope today’s episode has given you a fresh perspective on how babies really communicate through their gaze, their cries, and even their scent, and how tuning in to these subtle cues can help build a deeper connection and sense of security for your little one.

If you find value in this chat, I’d love for you to subscribe so that you don’t miss future episodes. And if you’re feeling inspired, please give me a quick rating or review. It really helps me reach more moms who need support. You’ll find links to Ann’s website, Nurtured Noggins and her Instagram in the show notes if you’d like to explore more of her wonderful work.

Until next time, remember, your baby is communicating and you are doing better than you think. Before you go, this episode wraps up our early communication series and I truly hope it’s helped you feel more in tune with your little one’s cues and connection needs. Coming up next on First Time Mum’s Chat, I’m kicking off a brand new five part series called Move, Play Grow, all about supporting your baby’s development through music and movement.

In the next episode, we’ll dive into tummy time and early sensory movement and how simple things like humming, swaying, and soft lullabys can turn tummy time into a soothing, connected experience for both of you. So if this sounds like something you’d love to explore, be sure to follow the podcast and join me for the next episode.

Take care, and I’ll chat with you again soon.