ABSTRACT
Babies are born into a complex social world. Through active participation in interactions with people more skilled than themselves — adults and children, familiar and unfamiliar — children develop an understanding of the actions, desires, feelings, intentions and beliefs of others. This enables them to form and maintain relationships and to learn the conventions of behaviour within the society. From 2 months of age, parents and infants are able to hold each other's attention and engage in intricate, mutually regulated interchanges, primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen and Aitken 2001). This ‘dance’ of social communication is the beginning of the infant's learning of social behaviour (see Table 6).
