Serve and return interactions are the GOLD of the baby room. They are the tiny back-and-forth exchanges that happen when a baby communicates something – an interest, a feeling, a discovery, a desire to connect – and somebody notices and responds in an appropriate way. This enables the baby to respond again, and the interaction continues going back and forth between baby and adult. The exchange might only last a few seconds before the baby turns their attention elsewhere, but an interaction like this is fantastic for a baby’s development and wellbeing. They look ordinary but sit at the heart of babies’ relationships, communication, learning and sense of belonging.
When we think about improving serve and return interactions, though, we can be tempted to jump straight to the return: what should the adult say or do in response? Before we get anywhere near that question, there is something even more fundamental to think about. For us to return a baby’s serve, we first have to notice that a serve has happened.
Babies are serving all the time
A serve is any attempt a baby makes to connect with us or to draw us into something that has captured their attention. Sometimes those serves are easy to spot. A baby might reach towards us, make a loud sound or offer us an object. But many serves are much less obvious than this. A baby’s eyes might widen as they notice something unexpected. Their gaze might shift from an object towards our face and back again. Their fingers might reach towards an object nearby. They might kick their legs as a familiar person approaches, become suddenly still when they hear a sound, move their body a little closer to us, or turn away and towards something else. The more we start looking for these small communications, the more we realise just how much babies are telling us throughout the day.
For us to return a baby’s serve, we first have to notice that a serve has happened.
This is where thinking about babies’ communication as multimodal is so useful. Communication doesn’t happen through one channel, and babies certainly don’t wait until they have words before they begin communicating with the people around them. They communicate through gaze, facial expression, vocalisation, gesture, movement, posture, touch and proximity, often using several of these modes at once. A baby’s whole body is potentially part of what they are telling us. That means noticing a serve asks something quite sophisticated of us. We need to be alert not just to what babies say or even to the obvious gestures they make, but to small shifts across all these different modes of communication. We are learning to read a subtle language of the body.
What becomes visible when we change where we are?
Imagine a baby sitting on the floor exploring a wooden ring. Nearby, an educator is standing beside a shelf, putting away some resources. The baby turns the ring over in his hands and bangs it gently against the floor. Then he looks up towards the educator. She doesn’t see him because her attention is on the shelf in front of her. After a moment, he looks back at the ring. Nothing particularly dramatic has happened. Nobody has done anything wrong. The educator is close by, engaged in a perfectly reasonable part of the baby room day, and the baby is contentedly exploring. But there was a serve in there: a tiny invitation from the baby to share what had just happened. It came and went unnoticed.
Now imagine almost exactly the same scene, but this time the educator is sitting nearby, leaning comfortably against the wall. The baby turns the ring over, bangs it against the floor and looks towards her. This time, their eyes meet. The educator raises her eyebrows slightly and smiles. The baby looks back at the ring and bangs it again, before looking back towards her. She smiles again and leans forward. There it is: serve, return, serve, return. It isn’t an interaction that would necessarily attract anybody’s attention from across the room. The educator hasn’t introduced a learning activity or offered a stream of language. But she and the baby have shared back-and-forth communication that started with the adult noticing something of interest to the baby.
We could describe the educator in the second example as being “more attentive”, but I don’t think that explanation takes us far enough. There is a much more practical difference between the two situations: the educator’s body is somewhere from which the baby’s communication is easier to perceive. When we are standing while babies are playing on the floor, there is an enormous amount of their communication that we simply cannot see easily. The direction of a baby’s gaze, a tiny movement of their fingers, a fleeting facial expression or that crucial glance from an interesting object back towards our face are all much more visible when our faces and bodies are closer to the baby’s level. Just as importantly, we become more available to the baby. It becomes easier for them to catch our eye, reach towards us, show us something and discover whether we are interested too.
“Notice more!” isn’t really a strategy
This matters because when we talk about responsive interactions, one of our solutions can sometimes amount to telling educators to notice more. Be more attentive. Tune in. Watch carefully. It’s not that these statement aren’t good guidance, but they don’t tell us very much about what we actually need to do to support these things to happen. We cannot rely on attentiveness as though it were simply a quality that a good educator switches on. Our capacity to notice is shaped by where our bodies are, where our eyes are directed, what our ears can hear and what else is occupying our attention at that particular moment. If we want to notice more serves, we therefore need to get interested in the very practical question of what makes babies’ communication visible to us.
Our capacity to notice is shaped by where our bodies are, where our eyes are directed, what our ears can hear and what else is occupying our attention.
Physical position is one particularly powerful place to start. If I spend more of my time comfortably at babies’ level, what becomes available to me that I would otherwise miss? If I sit alongside babies rather than continually moving around them, do I begin to see the tiny moments when they check my face? If I am close enough to hear their quieter vocalisations, do I notice communication from babies whose serves are less obvious? If I spend some time simply being with babies without feeling that I have to initiate an activity or make something happen, do I become more aware of what they are already initiating? These aren’t questions about trying harder to be a good educator. They are questions about putting ourselves in positions where noticing becomes easier.
Learning the communication of this particular baby
There is another layer to noticing that I think is especially important in the baby room. Becoming good at noticing serves isn’t just about developing a general knowledge of how babies communicate. It is about getting to know how this baby communicates. One baby’s excitement might fill their whole body: legs kicking, arms moving and a loud squeal. Another baby’s excitement might show itself in a tiny frown as they focus. One baby might repeatedly look towards an adult when they want to share a discovery, while another might just come ever so slightly closer to you without making eye contact at all. One baby might become increasingly vocal when they want an interaction to continue, while another might simply wait and watch to see what we do next.
This is one of the reasons why sustained relationships with babies matter so much. As we get to know a baby, we build up an increasingly rich understanding of their communicative repertoire. We begin to recognise what interest looks like for them, how they invite somebody into their play, what they do when they are uncertain, how they check whether we have seen what they have seen, and how they tell us that they have had enough. We become better at recognising the meaning that sits within tiny changes in their gaze, posture, expression, movement and sound.
A tiny experiment: don’t try to improve anything
So here’s something very simple to try in your baby room. Choose ten minutes when you can be comfortably close to the babies and, for those ten minutes, don’t try to have better interactions. Don’t introduce an exciting activity, make a special effort to talk more, or try to manufacture lots of serve and return. Instead, make the experiment entirely about noticing. Every time you think you spot a serve, simply acknowledge it to yourself: “Oh! There was one.” Perhaps it was a glance, a hand movement or a small vocalisation. Perhaps a baby looked at something and then checked your face. Perhaps they moved closer to another person or became suddenly still as something captured their attention. You don’t need a tally sheet and you don’t even need to count them. The point is to practise seeing just how much communication is already happening.
You could try the experiment again from a different physical position. Sit somewhere you wouldn’t usually sit, settle against a wall, spend some time on the floor, or position yourself alongside rather than opposite a baby. Then notice what becomes visible from there. Can you see babies’ faces differently? Can you follow their gaze more easily? Do you notice their hands? Can babies catch your eye without having to work very hard to do it? This isn’t about prescribing one “correct” position for educators to occupy throughout the day. It is about becoming curious about the relationship between where we put ourselves and what we are able to notice.
Serve and return interactions begin with babies. They are already looking, reaching, sounding, moving, pausing, checking, approaching and turning away. We don’t need to generate all of that communication for them; it is already happening around us. Our job is to become increasingly skilled at recognising it and, crucially, to put ourselves somewhere – physically and mentally – where babies’ communication has a chance of reaching us. We will never catch every serve and that’s never going to be the aim. But we can become much more curious about the serves that are happening all around us, including the quietest and most fleeting ones.
Want to explore baby room interactions in more depth?
Serve and return is one of the ideas we explore in Creating Inspiring Baby Room Interactions, my six-unit self-paced programme for baby room educators and leaders. The course takes a deeper look at how we can understand babies’ communication and develop the responsive, connected interactions that sit at the heart of a great baby room.