What can I do with my three-month-old?

The dos are shorter than you'd expect

We asked for the dos and don'ts of playing with a three-month-old, half expecting a curriculum.

It's mostly four things: your face, your voice, something to look at, and time on the floor. Everything else is variation.

Repetition is the point

This is the counterintuitive bit. The instinct is to keep things varied so she doesn't get bored.

She doesn't get bored the way you do. Doing the same small thing over and over is how she learns that an action has a result — and the twentieth repetition is doing more than the first.

So: the same silly noise. The same rattle in the same spot. The same peekaboo. Long past the point where you're tired of it.

Leave gaps too. Say something, then wait five long seconds. It feels like an eternity and it's how conversation gets built — she needs far more processing time than feels natural, and most of us fill the silence before she's had a chance. Papa once talked like he does normally, and Ari simply started to cry. It was too quick and too much to process all in one go. Their mind is still developing. He was overexcited and ti backfired.

Follow rather than direct

Name what she's already looking at instead of redirecting her to what you'd prefer.

It sounds like a small thing and it's one of the more consistent findings in early language development. Her attention is already somewhere; putting words on that is worth more than moving it.

Don't push past the point where she looks away. Turning her head, glazing, fussing, hiccupping — that's a break request, and overriding it produces an overstimulated baby you'll then spend an hour settling.

Don't fill the room with noise and lights at once. Several things competing means none of them land.

Don't prop her in seats for long stretches instead of floor time.

And don't measure a day by how much you did. Some days she isn't interested, and that's a day, not a failure.