Panelists

<figure style="width: 125px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Dr. Phil Fisher</figcaption></figure>
<figure style="width: 125px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Patricia Marinho</figcaption></figure>
<figure style="width: 125px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Sarah Ryan</figcaption></figure>

Additional Resources

Resources from the Center on the Developing Child

• Working Paper 1: Young Children Develop in an Environment of Relationships


• Serve & Return Interaction Shapes Brain Circuitry


• 5 Steps for Brain-Building Serve and Return


• How-to Video: 5 Steps for Brain-Building Serve and Return


• Play in Early Childhood: The Role of Play in Any Setting


• Building Babies’ Brains Through Play: Mini Parenting Master Class


• FIND: Filming Interactions to Nurture Development

Articles

• Beecher, Michael D. & Burt, John M. (2004). The role of social interaction in bird song learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(6), 224-228.


• Kok, R., Thijssen, S., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. et al. (2015). Normal variation in early parental sensitivity predicts child structural brain development. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 54(10), 824–831.


• Kuhl, P.K., Ramírez, R.R., Bosseler, A., Lin, J.L. & Imada, T. (2014). Infants’ brain responses to speech suggest analysis by synthesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111(31), 11238-11245.


• Levy, J., Goldstein, A. & Feldman, R. (2019). The neural development of empathy is sensitive to caregiving and early trauma. Nature Communications, 10, 1905.


• Marler, Peter (1970). Birdsong and speech development: Could there be parallels?. American Scientist, 58(6), 669-673.


• Ramírez-Esparza, N., García-Sierra, A. & Kuhl, P.K. (2014). Look who’s talking: Speech style and social context in language input to infants is linked to concurrent and future speech development. In press: Developmental Science, 17(6), 880-91.


• Rifkin-Graboi, A., Kong, L., Sim, L.W. et al. (2015). Maternal sensitivity, infant limbic structure volume and functional connectivity: A preliminary study. Translational Psychiatry, 5, e668.


• Romeo, R.R., Leonard, J.A., Robinson, S.T., et al. (2018). Beyond the 30-million-word gap: Children’s conversational exposure is associated with language-related brain function. Psychological Science, 29(5), 700-710.


• Sethna, V., Pote, I., Wang, S. et al. (2017). Mother–infant interactions and regional brain volumes in infancy: An MRI study. Brain Structure and Function, 222, 2379–2388.


• Yu, C. & Smith, L.B. (2013). Joint attention without gaze following: Human infants and their parents coordinate visual attention to objects through eye-hand coordination. PLoS One, 8(11), e79659.

Resources from Our Panelists

Dr. Phil Fisher

• The FIND Program

Patricia Marinho

• Tempojunto (in Portuguese)


• Progama BEM (video in Portuguese with English subtitles)

Transcript

Sally: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a new podcast from The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m your host, Sally Pfitzer. Our Center believes that advances in science can provide a powerful source of new ideas that can improve outcomes for children and families. We want to help you apply the science of early childhood development to your everyday interactions with children, and take what you’re hearing from our experts and panels and apply it to your everyday work. In today’s episode, we’re going to dive into the science behind serve and return interactions and we’ll learn how important responsive relationships are to healthy development. Later in the podcast, we’ll incorporate these positive interactions into ordinary moments throughout your day. Here to discuss serve and return is Dr. Jack Shonkoff, who is the professor of Child Health and Development and the director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. Hey, Jack, we’re so glad to have you back.

Jack: Great to be here.

Sally: Today we’re going to dig into this concept of serve and return, so I’m wondering if you could start just telling us a little bit about what serve and return is.

Jack: Serve and return is a very simple phrase that tells us about how important the back and forth interaction is between very young children, actually beginning immediately after birth, and the adults who care for them. Serve and return, as we’re using it now, refers to how parents, or other adults who care for young children, exchange vocalizations. They make sounds, they look at each other. There’s back and forth interaction that occurs naturally between babies, very young children and the adults who care for them. These are things that parents and other caregivers do pretty naturally. Even if you haven’t had a course in child development, we are biologically wired to be engaged in that kind of serve and return interaction because it is necessary for healthy development. If we didn’t do it, if it required a course in child development, millions of years ago we would have become extinct as a species because babies’ brains and young children’s brains wouldn’t have developed in the way they do. It’s the essence of what promotes healthy brain development very early.

Sally: Why is that important for healthy development of a child