Infants play with emotion: How to ‘pork it up’ with your baby
My baby was a pork chop … I called him that from about 6 months old when he would overexaggerate both positive and negative emotions. And, so, as politicians can pork up their budgets and add excessive amounts of government spending to legislation, he would pork up his ways of relating and showing his cognitive and social awareness of feelings. He would pretend to cry at 7 months (see image below) and by 14 months he pretended to cough, sneeze, laugh and, still, cry, engaging us with powerful and evocative communication.
I call the sophisticated developmental capabilities infants use to engage our attention and evoke our feelings ‘emotional capital practices’ (Salamon et al., 2017). For example, babies say and do very specific things with their faces where they overexaggerate what is considered a genuine smile, known as a ‘Duchenne smile’ which can be created intentionally to influence both our own body and mind, and other people’s impressions (which you can read about here) (see image above). Having observed babies engaging in these sophisticated ways as an early childhood teacher and having seen snippets emerge in my PhD (which you can read about
here), these emotional capital practices became the focus of my research.
Pretending with emotions can be playful … The study documented infants’ (other than my own child) emotional capital practices and found that what seemed emotional behaviours, like my pork chop’s pretending to cry and cough, are actually social, underpinned by a ‘bank’ of accumulated cognitive knowledge (Salamon et al., 2017). As such, adults interested in upholding infants’ rights to quality early learning experiences can respond to and initiate these expressions in social ways that promote learning, because babies are learning all the time (which you can read more about here).
Babies’ social capacities are underestimated, however, and among the challenges of promoting early learning for infants is an ongoing struggle to know what to ‘do’ with babies (Stratigos & Salamon, 2019) especially in relation to play based learning. Thankfully, the study documented what it looked like to engage in play with babies but not classic ideas of object-related play, like building blocks, trains or feeding baby dolls (you can read more about this here). Instead, the study showed that babies play with what they know about the relational world around them and when we become playful with them, we co-regulate through ‘serve and return’ interactions that can build on and extend babies’ learning.
Babies learn through every day experiences... Everyday ‘serve and return’ interactions (which you can read more about here) were opportunities to engage with babies in pretend, playful, silly, and fun ways. Pretend play is connected with specific brain development and is said not to start until children are about three years old. As the study, my professional experience and my porkchop show, however, babies can pretend to laugh, cry, sneeze, and cough from six months old, so to extend learning it makes sense to purposely ‘plan’ for such pretend play opportunities.
Using meaningful, simple, everyday experiences to pretend with babies in playful ways can develop a number of avenues of learning. For example, overexaggerating and pretending to laugh or cry while labelling associated emotions in simple and clear ways as ‘happy’ and ‘sad’. This helps literacy (labelling), emotional (being able to use words to help express feelings), and social (being able to recognise those feelings in others) development. Being silly and having fun in playful ways with your own porkchop babies are also excellent ways to play with emotions at home. By rethinking play in ways babies CAN participate, we can help them experience play that promotes their learning, develops secure connections, and can be fun for all involved!
