I've always been fascinated by how babies communicate. Think about it really. A baby comes into the world with absolutely no words and yet they have so much to tell us.

The little coos, the squeals, those high-pitched pterodactyl sounds which make you wonder how on earth something so small can be so loud. The way they lock eyes with you, smile, make a sound and then wait for you to do something.

And when you coo back they may do it again. It's as if they're saying, "Oh you heard me! Let's keep going!"

And that's what I find absolutely incredible about human communication. We're having conversations with our babies long before they ever say their first word.

Communication is so much more than the words we use. It's about connection, it's about expressing our needs, it's about building relationships and it's about learning about the people around us.

And those simple back and forth exchanges between a baby and their carer are actually helping to build the foundations of language, social interaction and relationships.

Occasionally I wonder how easy it is to just miss the early sounds altogether as we're so keen to hear the very first "mama" or "dada".

But there's something rather remarkable happening right from the very first word.

Our babies are already learning the power of being heard.

I expand on my obsession for child development with an evolutionary spin in my chat with Madeleine Beekman, an evolutionary biologist, Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, and author of The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why. As a pediatrician, I'm constantly talking about speech milestones. Her book poses a question I'd never really stopped to consider: why do we have language?

(Fun fact: my love of evolution comes from my dad, who's a lifelong learner and passed that on to me, so this one felt very personal.

Madeleine's answer starts with birth. We have such big brains that we have big heads, and there's only so much room in the pelvis if we're still to walk upright. So human babies are born prematurely, with brains that have a massive amount of growth still ahead of them.

A baby giraffe literally wobbles to its feet straight after birth. Ours can't even get their heads up. Human babies need a massive amount of help, and so do the people raising them. In Madeleine's view, that shared need for help has driven us as a species toward language.

It also tells you a lot about the newborn phase. I like to think of postpartum as a form of hazing. You're just dropped into sleep deprivation, you're learning to be a completely different person, and somehow you come out the other side with an innate knowledge of the hungry cry versus the I need you cry. I still have a pretty good sense of when my daughter is not going to settle, and I need to go back in. Madeleine described babies as being absolutely brilliant at manipulating the adults around them (in the most positive way possible), and I really liked that she put it that way.

If babies evolved to require that level of care, then they evolved to require more than one or two adults to provide it. That last bit really hit home for me.

I became a first-time mom in December 2019. Three months later, the world stopped. Our first year was me, my husband (who worked a lot), and a nanny. No playdates. We didn't have a real village at all for about three and a half years.

I'll never know how much of my son's talking timeline was just him being him (kids are so different). But when he got into childcare at 14 months, we saw a real explosion in language. Madeleine has a strong view that childcare is just you farming your kids out, and I suspect a lot of parents carrying around childcare guilt will be quite interested to hear it.

We also talked about where the connection happens day to day. For us, that's dinner. My husband is an ER doctor, so we don't necessarily all get to the table every night, but when we do, we don't have phones. On a particularly hard day recently (my husband and son were both out of town), I spent a lot more time just cuddling with my daughter at bedtime. I needed it more than she did, and it was our smoothest bedtime in weeks.

And it got me thinking about how much we need connection as human beings. From those first newborn coos to conversations around the dinner table, our need to communicate and connect is woven into who we are.

And apparently, it may have played a role in why we're even here today.

Because here's something fascinating. There were once several different human species sharing this planet. So how did we end up as the only one left?

Madeleine has a theory, and it involves a whole lot of talking.

Listen to my full interview with Madeleine Beekman wherever you listen to podcasts or watch it on my YouTube channel. Her book is available wherever books are sold and you can read more of her writing on her Substack.

I am so grateful that you continue to make space for these conversations. If the podcast has been helpful to you, leaving a review wherever you listen is one of the simplest ways to help more parents find the show.

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