06/02/2025
This 👌🫶
Serve and return...develop those meaningful connections to build on interactions, to build on communication skills 👏
If you missed my conversation about Serve and Return and Peek a Boo with Claire Byrne this morning on RTE Radio 1, you can listen back at the link below:
https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22484709/
The size of a child’s brain reaches 90 per cent of an adults by the age of five. Early childhood is a time of rapid change – particularly for the development of a child’s brain. So, the early years are critical for lifelong learning and well-being. Talking, reading, playing and singing with babies and toddlers is so important in shaping thinking and emotional patterns for life.
Serve and return interactions are like a game of tennis between the two participants, where the conversation flows back and forth between the pair. From around three months old, babies begin to recognise the repeated words and actions of simple games and can start to predict and anticipate what will happen next. When they guess right, a feel-good hormone called dopamine is released in the brain, which is one of the reasons they enjoy playing these games again and again.
Even before they can speak, playing peekaboo with your baby can help them to learn the basic rhythms of conversation and practise their listening skills. When playing peekaboo, your little one will be developing their sense of object permanence, this is the ability to understand that an object or person is still there even though it can’t be seen. This also helps with problem-solving skills as they get older.
Serve and Return is also particularly important to learn language. Researchers used to believe that the most important thing in developing children’s language skills was the number of words they hear every day. But new research has found that it is how parents talk to their children that really counts. An interplay between parent and child is the best way to build children’s language. For years parents have been thinking that talking at children, using flash cards, or baby Einstein videos, is improving their children’s language. Instead we should be spending one on one time with them engaging them in meaningful conversation.
Serve and Return involves giving our children our full attention. But increasingly we are being distracted by our technology. Research in the UK has made links between parents distracted by technology and children starting school without the expected language and social skills for their age. We call it ‘technoference’ – when the time we spend on devices interferes with positive interactions with our children. If parents are constantly distracted by technology, they are missing the everyday cues to interact with their children.
Children learn easily through these ‘serve and return’ interactions as they are active participants in enjoyable interactions. It is the ‘dance’ of interaction between parent and child that is important.
