When should I start playing with my newborn?

When she was nearly one month corrected

That was the point we asked, and the question had a second half: how do we keep her more awake and engaged during the day.

Both reasonable. And the answer to the first is earlier than we expected, while the answer to the second turned out to matter less than we thought.

Newborn play doesn't look like play

There are no toys involved and nothing to buy.

It's your face, held at roughly the distance from your arms to your eyes, which is about as far as she can focus. It's your voice. It's slow movement she can follow. It's being held and carried and talked to.

High contrast helps early — black and white patterns, strong edges — because colour vision is still developing. But a face beats any card you can buy, and it's free.

That's the entire curriculum for the first weeks.

Short, and stopped early

A few minutes is a session. Newborns tire fast, and an overstimulated baby is much harder to settle afterwards.

The signal is easy once you know it: she looks away. Turning her head, glazing over, going fussy, hiccupping. That's her asking for a break, and the right response is to stop rather than to work harder at engaging her.

Papa got this wrong at first and tried to hold her attention. He kept trying to bond with Ari and was trying to make her laugh, play with her, show her images…Mama worked it out before papa did and said plainly not to overstimulate her, which was the single most useful piece of advice we got that month.

Short and often — a minute or two, several times a day, building up.

On your chest while you're reclined counts, and it's the version most newborns tolerate first. Across your lap works too.

Always while she's awake and watched, and not straight after a feed.

And all of this runs on corrected age. Ours was born at 33 weeks, so at two months old she was around two weeks corrected, and every activity chart we read described a different baby until we adjusted.