“You and Your Child: How Many Interactions Are Enough?”

“You and Your Child: How Many Interactions Are Enough?”

By Junlei Li, PhD

A number of years ago, I was giving a presentation to a parent group of children with disabilities. I described how even a simple, small interaction between caregivers and children can be meaningful and powerful. After the talk, a parent approached me with some visible hesitation and asked, “I know every interaction is so important for my child. But I am wondering, do you know how many interactions a day would be enough?”

It turns out that she was raising her young child as a single parent. She worked very long hours to afford sending her child to physical therapy and specialized education programs. Several nights a week, her parents would’ve already put the child in bed by the time she came home from work. She tried to spend more time with her child on the weekends, but she still felt that she was not doing enough. As she talked through the reasons for her question, her eyes welled up.

I heard some form of this question over and over again from parents and educators who wanted so much to spend more time with their children or students but could not find “enough” of it. There were parents who worked night or weekend shifts, traveled frequently, or attended school themselves in addition to working. There were teachers who had 40 to 50 preschoolers in their classrooms. There were migrant workers who saw their children for only two weeks out of an entire year.

“How many interactions are enough?” is a profoundly important question for families and researchers alike. Often, when we talk about the importance of interactions and relationships for young children’s development, we do not explicitly address this question. Some of the metaphors and language we use may even imply that there are no limits as to how many interactions are needed. Take, for example, the very popular metaphor of “serve and return,” comparing parent-child interactions to the back-and-forth of a tennis match. Joshua Sparrow, MD, a pediatrician who directs the Brazelton Touchpoints Center, once pushed me to think deeper when I brought up the metaphor: Does it mean that every serve (from a child) should be returned? What happens if a parent misses a serve? Have we forever damaged our child’s chances for learning and development?

No.

The pioneering developmental psychologist Ed Tronick, PhD, of the University of Massachusetts in Boston, best known to the world for his Still Face experiment, has a particular interest in how children and parents reconnect after they fall “out of tune” with one another. He reassures parents that disconnects are normal and frequent within even the healthiest relationships. To put a number to the phenomenon, Dr. Tronick offers the ratio of 70 percent disconnected moments to 30 percent connected ones, which he found through careful observations of parent-child interactions. Not only are moments of disconnect normal and typical in parent-child relationships, they are also necessary for healthy development because they offer opportunities for “reconnect” or “repair.” In the 2020 book The Power of Discord, by Dr. Tronick and practicing pediatrician Claudia Gold, MD, the authors reassure parents:

From infancy to old age, we draw energy from human relationships, with all their inherent imperfections, for the strength to move through discomfort and distress to coherence, complexity, and creativity. It is the pleasure of reconnection that produces the energy necessary for growth.

Researchers who study children’s language development have arrived at a similar conclusion. There was a time when researchers and policymakers focused on the sheer number of words children heard from their primary caregiver from birth to age 3. However, a more complete understanding emerged over the past two decades: While both the quantity of words and the quality of interactions matter, the quality of interactions matters much more significantly.

In a research review written for pediatricians, Meredith Rowe, EdD, a language expert from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Barry Zuckerman, MD, a professor from Boston University School of Medicine and cofounder of the national Reach Out and Read program, offered this encouraging prescription:

Parents should not get the wrong message and be stressed out about talking all the time or meeting a set number of words per day. Instead, they should focus on finding time for even brief high-quality, loving interactions.

Such quality is not easily quantified but can be felt in the depth of care and connection. While it can sound like reading stories or singing songs, it can also make no sounds at all, like the quiet moments holding a child who’s drifting to sleep. It can take place in the joyful jumping, running, and swinging on the playground, as well as in caregiving routines like diapering, bathing, and eating together.

I think back to that parent who asked me, “How many interactions are enough?” and wish I had known back then what I have since learned from researchers and caregivers in all walks of life. Simple, everyday interactions with our children do matter — for children and for ourselves. But it is a typical human experience that we are not by our children’s side all the time. When we do our very best to be present during the moments we are able to be with our children, we can be enough. The relationship between children and parents grows stronger and deeper through these natural rhythms of connection, disconnection, and reconnection.

Junlei Li, PhD, is the Saul Zaentz Chair in Early Childhood Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as well as a Nurture Connection Steering Committee member. He has previously talked with us about principles of ERH; the essentiality of centering connection, growth, and healing in relationships; and how discord can be a pathway for relational repair, growth, and healing — both within ERH and this present moment. His research and practice focus on understanding and supporting the work of helpers — those who serve children and families on the front lines of education and social services. Dr. Li studied and learned from a wide range of developmental settings with low resources but high-quality practices, including orphanages, childcare, classrooms, and community youth programs. He developed the Simple Interactions approach to help identify what ordinary people do extraordinarily well with children in everyday moments and made that the basis for promoting positive system change.