The science behind building a secure attachment with your baby

Some parents and caregivers worry that being overly responsive will cause their child to become spoiled or too dependent—but research has proven otherwise. There’s simply no way to spoil a baby ❤️

During the newborn stage, it’s okay to pick up your baby the second they start crying or rock or feed them to sleep. Responding right away to their basic needs—food, sleep, diapers, shelter, comfort—helps them feel safe.

Building close bonds with your newborn

When psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth developed and studied attachment theory, they found that focused, consistent attention and physical intimacy from a parent or primary caregiver had lasting positive effects on children as they grew older. These effects included higher IQ scores, more emotional stability, and better physical health. In other words, what we know instinctively to be true—that all babies need love—has a lot of scientific evidence to back it up.

6 tips for bonding with your new baby

Here are some ways to connect:

1. Make time to be present, uninterrupted, and face-to-face. Babies naturally want to look at faces, especially yours. When your baby is alert, spend time looking into their eyes and softly talking or singing to them. As Jill Stamm says in her book “Bright From the Start,” “Your face is your child’s first toy.”

2. Have back-and-forth conversations. “Serve and return” is a term coined by Harvard researchers who found that back-and-forth interactions with babies—even newborns—can have a profound effect on their brain architecture, emotional development, and cognitive growth. Even though you can’t have a real conversation with your baby yet, you can still react verbally and physically to cues like facial expressions, movements, and sounds. It might look like this:

1. Your baby scrunches up their eyes, wrinkles their forehead, frowns, or arches their back.
2. You stroke them and say, “Oh, that light is so bright. Should I turn it off?” 
3. Your baby moves their head. 
4. You turn off the light and say, “There. Is that better?”

When your baby is this young, what you say is less important than what you do: try paying attention to your baby’s little movements and noises, responding to them, and then waiting to see what they do next.

3. Hold and snuggle them skin-to-skin. Skin-to-skin time is among the best ways to bond with a newborn. Even just a few minutes can help soothe you both, release oxytocin (a feel-good hormone), regulate your baby’s temperature and breathing, and provide moments of closeness.

4. Sing to them. Your baby doesn’t care how well you can sing or follow a beat—what they love is the melodic sound of your voice. This not only soothes them, it helps them learn the sounds and patterns of language.

5. Read to them. Reading to a newborn can feel a little strange, but your voice is one of their favorite sounds, and they learn from the start that reading can be a pleasurable, loving experience.

6. Let others help. Most babies have multiple attachment figures by the end of their first year, and research shows that having multiple close and healthy bonds with different caregivers can benefit children in the long run. If you need a rest or are returning to work, it’s healthy to put your baby in the hands of other loving caregivers.

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Learn more about the research

Bretherton, I. (1992). The origins of attachment theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Developmental Psychology, 28(5), 759–775.

Dagan, O., & Sagi‐Schwartz, A. (2021). Early attachment networks to multiple caregivers: History, assessment models, and future research recommendations. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2021(180), 9-19.

Schaffer, H. R., & Emerson, P. E. (1964). The development of social attachments in infancy. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 29(3), 1-77.

Shonkoff, J. P. (2017). Breakthrough impacts: What science tells us about supporting early childhood development. Young Children, 72(2), 8-16.