Supporting your toddler’s development through responsive parenting

As a parent, it’s easy to identify our children’s physical needs – nutritious food, shelter, access to effective health services. But a child’s emotional needs, particularly in a young child or toddler, might not be as obvious as they are still learning how to communicate.

One of the most vital experiences in shaping a child’s developing brain is what’s known as ‘serve and return’ interaction between children and parents. Infants and toddlers naturally reach out for interaction through babbling, facial expressions, and gestures and adults respond with the same kind of gesturing back.¹ This back-and-forth process is fundamental to the wiring of the brain, especially in the earliest years.

Responsive parenting encourages ‘serve and return’ interaction through the expression of warm and accepting behaviours to respond to children’s emotional signals.

This aspect of parenting helps us understand and better respond to our children’s needs and can have a significant influence on a young child’s health and development.^2,3

Understanding our children’s needs can be a complicated process; one that often sees us closely observing and making sense of the signals our children are giving us through their behaviour. Responsive parenting involves us being more conscious and aware of our children to be able to learn what makes them tick – what makes them excited, engaged, angry or calm. It can take different forms depending on the situation, for example if we are responding to cues such as a sign of illness, a verbal comment, or a particular facial expression.² It can also depend on who is responding, which in the early years is often the mother. In each case, if we are responding to a situation with our children, it tends to follow a three stage process: ²

1. Observation: Observing our children’s body language and cues, such as their actions and dialogue
2. Interpretation: Interpreting these signals, for example are they tired, or are they showing signs of feeling unwell?
3. Action: Acting quickly, consistently and efficiently to meet our children’s needs

Responsive parenting is immensely powerful, improving child health and development both in the short and long term, even at a genetic level. The genes our children inherit are not static or set in stone but are ‘expressed’ - activated or deactivated - by our children’s experiences. This in turn shapes their developing brain architecture and strongly affects whether they grow up to be healthy, productive members of society.

Positive experiences leave a chemical “signature” on the genes that activate a child’s genetic potential.^4,5

School-age children whose mothers provided positive experiences early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress.⁶

Studies have also shown that maternal responsiveness has a protective effect on the development of low-birth-weight infants, decreasing problems such as social anxiety and depressive mood.^7,8

Whilst responsive relationships are important to a child’s health and development, an absence of such parenting may have a negative impact, particularly in toddlers. Clearly there may be circumstances and situations in which we are unable to immediately respond to the everyday (sometimes demanding) needs of our toddlers and so parents shouldn’t overly worry about not being at their toddler’s constant beck and call.

But from infancy a significant breakdown in the ‘serve and respond’ interaction, unreliable or lack of responses may disrupt development of the child’s brain. The lost opportunities associated with a lack of interaction with our children may lead to stress in a toddler, that may lead to problems in learning, behaviour and health.^1,9

Being consistently responsive and understanding our children’s ever changing development needs is a complex and demanding process, that some of us may find harder to achieve than others.¹⁰ This may be particularly true in specific circumstances such as for parents of children with special needs. It is often the case that parents from underprivileged backgrounds assume they have less impact on their children’s outcomes, but even small efforts to respond to our children can have a positive outcome.

Parenting is hard. Responsive parenting can be highly demanding and in some cases there is some coaching to be done. In fact, interventions helping parents recognise the importance of responsive behaviours have shown that increases in responsiveness result in children developing more secure bonding and attachment to their parents along with better problem-solving, language, and social skills.¹¹

An excellent example of this interaction is shared book reading. We may already undertake the routine of reading a book to our children before bed, but shared book reading can lead to other benefits.

Studies have examined the impact of teaching parents to use techniques that encourage young children to talk about illustrations and the book as a whole. These techniques and interactions had positive effects on children’s language, particularly for children at low risk for literacy problems.^11,12

The relationships we establish with our children provide the basis for their social and emotional development. Early parent-child relationships also set the stage for our children’s emotional well-being and social relationships in later stages of life. Having such an early impact on the future development of our children underscores why a lack of responsiveness can be unfavourable in the earliest years of life. Recognising the importance of responsive parenting and where needed, offering effective interventions, are likely to result in better long-term outcomes in emotional well-being, learning, health, and parenting of the next generation.¹