The newborn in the 3rd month

By the third month, the newborn’s wake-sleep rhythms should have stabilized. He is now looking for new ways to communicate and explore the world.

Definitions

The term newborn refers to a child from birth to 28 days, or 4 weeks, of life. The first week of life is called the early neonatal period . To refer to the child from the 29th day to the 6th month of life it is more correct to use the word infant . The term child is more generic and is used in both situations.

In everyday language, and therefore also in the searches you do online, the term newborn is used as a synonym for infant. For this reason, on some occasions we have used the word newborn instead of infant.

During this period, everything that comes within reach of the newborn is touched, sucked, grabbed and possibly shaken.

His parents are now familiar to him, he knows their faces well, their looks, and he is learning to make himself understood very quickly.

Lying on his stomach, he can support himself on his elbows and lift his chest.

He has already learned to coordinate, to recognize where sounds come from, to understand when he is being spoken to.

Development

9th week

It is around this time that your baby is likely to show a keen interest in music, sounds and voices.

His reactions to your words, or to some shrill music of some song playing on the radio, will cause him to respond with an “ohh”.

Don’t let him miss the stimuli and opportunities to discover new sounds.

Always keep talking to him and, if you have time, you can already start reading him some books.

As a baby, he is not yet able to understand the meaning of the individual words you pronounce, but the bricks that will form the database of his vocabulary are already beginning to settle in his brain.

10th week

His increased ability to recognize faces and people who are more familiar to him, makes him very dynamic and active in any social context.

His ability to recognize his parents even in a group of several people makes him more confident and participates more in family activities.

You will begin to notice that he enjoys being around you when you enjoy his company.

11th week

Your baby starts sleeping less and being active for longer periods of time.

He is always very interested in knowing everything around him, but he also begins to show more interest in some things and less in others.

For example, if you are playing with him and you notice that he gets distracted and looks away, it means that he is bored and wants to do something else!

All the changes – both physically and cognitively and emotionally – that occur in the newborn in these first weeks are very rapid, and therefore require continuous adaptation also on the part of the parents.

12th week

The moment has arrived, or is about to arrive, to discover his hands.

Hands, with their complexity of shapes, uses and… tastes, offer the child a wide variety of stimuli that will keep him busy in a creative and fun way.

Even in doing potentially dangerous things: so be careful where you put your hands. As always, it will be your task to help him make “experiments” with surfaces, fabrics, toys, baby food, etc.

The body weight

During its third month of life, the baby continues to be fed with mother’s milk or adapted formula milk.

Around the third month, his weight growth will probably begin to decrease: his growth which will go from about 160-180 grams / week, to about 100-110 grams / week (In this regard we specify that it is always and only necessary to refer to a pediatrician, as our observations are of a general nature and for informational purposes only).

All this translates into a weight gain of about 300-400 grams per month (up to the seventh month, approximately).

The frequency with which he will ask to take milk (breast or formula) will tend to decrease, but not yet so much as not to force you to wake up at night to feed him.

Games

As we have said several times, especially when we talked about his  1st month  and his   2nd month  of life, the baby needs to play: to have fun, but also to develop his motor, sensory and social skills.

To put the baby in a position to learn efficiently and above all in a non-frustrating way, you need to give him adequate toys, which are suitable for his level of learning, which are not dangerous.

Therefore, care must be taken that the toy he plays with is suitable for his age.

Do not give him toys suitable for older children which, in addition to not being suitable for his abilities, could also be dangerous.

For the same reason, it is necessary to avoid buying used, old toys that may not comply with the most recent safety regulations.

For the same reason – but this shouldn’t be necessary to specify – don’t buy toys from counterfeit brands (such as, for example, the “Lepin”, the Chinese Lego-compatible bricks).

Some useful things to know

Parents are excited by every little sign of their child that can let them know that he is growing and learning.

Rightly every gesture, sound or look is a small step that deserves to be welcomed with joy and gratitude: nothing, not even a single breath of his must ever be taken for granted.

That defenseless creature that you saw just a few weeks ago set foot on this earth for the first time will one day be stronger and maybe even more skilled than you.

The road he will still have to travel is very long, but these first gestures of his, these first experiences of his are decisive for his future.

You shouldn’t think of your baby as not yet fully developed. Rather consider it as a large construction site in progress, which needs your contribution to arrive at the end of the work in a harmonious and balanced way.

Babies’ babbling, from 2-3 months of age onwards, is one of the first manifestations of their new abilities.

It represents a phase of language acquisition, in which he experiments with the emission of articulated sounds, but without yet being able to produce words that are recognizable.

It is therefore important to talk to him, answer him, and stimulate him right now.

• Language development moves through a reciprocal process.
• Your talking to him is much more than an encouragement, of course.
• It also provides him with a pattern of sounds that register in the child’s world.

Research conducted over the past 30 years has shown that in their first six months of life (approximately), children are able to discriminate between all sounds produced in all languages.

But then they gradually lose this ability, and become unable to distinguish those sounds they don’t hear regularly in their familiar surroundings.

All of this suggests how important the external environment is, and how children model themselves on the external environment.

In this situation, you parents can – for example – repeat the name of the most common objects that the child uses or sees on a daily basis.

“Do you want your milk?”, “Look, here comes dad”, are examples of phrases that help the newborn immensely to associate a name with things and people.

Don’t be shy: speak up

Likewise, don’t overlook the fact that reading for your child is an important technique for stimulating them.

Some people think that children are too young to “respond” to books. This means that they have never read the “right” book for the child: a simple book, with lots of pictures and few words for each page.

Even toys are of great help in their long journey and – precisely because children love toys – it is also useful for this purpose to engage in activities with them when they are awake.

The fact of talking to children about toys also gives us the possibility of introducing verbs: “Do you want to ride your horse?”, “Can you give me the teddy bear?”

Lastly, remember that to bring your newborn to the results you want, any training course needs an atmosphere of love, tolerance and trust.