Babies start interacting from the very first weeks of life, though these early interactions are subtle. The first clear social milestone most parents notice is sustained eye contact, which typically begins around six to eight weeks old. From there, social skills build rapidly: smiling, cooing, copying facial expressions, and eventually pointing, waving, and responding to their own name. Here’s what to expect and when.
The First Two Months: Eye Contact and Social Smiling
Newborns aren’t just staring blankly. Within hours of birth, a brain system that mirrors the actions they observe is already active. Brain wave studies in newborns show specific patterns of cortical activity when they watch facial gestures, the same patterns that appear when they perform those gestures themselves. This built-in mirroring mechanism is what allows even very young babies to start tuning their behavior to yours through face-to-face signals.
The first unmistakable sign of interaction is eye contact, which becomes consistent around six to eight weeks. Around the same time, or shortly after, you’ll see your baby’s first “social smile,” a smile clearly directed at you rather than a reflexive one during sleep. By eight weeks, most babies are making sounds that signal happiness or distress in response to the people around them.
Two to Four Months: Cooing and Back-and-Forth
By the end of three months, babies begin making cooing sounds, those soft vowel-like “oohs” and “aahs” that often come during a face-to-face exchange. This is the start of conversational turn-taking. You talk, your baby pauses, then coos back. It doesn’t sound like language yet, but the rhythm of conversation is already there.
Around four months, laughing out loud appears. Babies at this age also start looking specifically for a parent or caregiver when they’re upset, showing that they’ve formed a clear preference for familiar people and understand, on some level, that those people provide comfort.
Six Months: Joint Attention Emerges
A major leap happens around six months, when babies begin producing what researchers call “joint attention bids.” This means your baby tries to draw your attention to something, or shifts their gaze between an object and your face to share the experience with you. A 2024 study published in the journal Infancy found that 44% of six-month-olds were already making these bids. By seven months, 72% were doing so, and by eight months, 92% had done it at least once.
This is a meaningful shift. Before joint attention, your baby interacted with you or with objects separately. Now they’re connecting the two, pulling you into their world. You might notice your baby looking at a toy, then looking at you, then back at the toy. That triangular gaze is one of the foundations of communication. Around this same age, many babies start looking up when their name is called, though a consistent response to their name typically solidifies closer to nine months.
Nine to Twelve Months: Names, Gestures, and Imitation
By about nine months, most babies will consistently turn toward you when you say their name, recognizing that you’re addressing them specifically. This is also when babies start to recognize familiar people by sight and connect “mama” and “dada” to the right person, rather than babbling those sounds randomly.
The nine-month mark is when many of the classic social gestures appear: pointing at things they want you to see, waving bye-bye, raising their arms to be picked up. Some researchers have described nine months as a turning point, when gaze alternation between objects and people becomes deliberate and babies begin producing early declarative gestures like showing and pointing.
By twelve months, babies are actively trying to copy speech sounds and simple actions. If you clap, they clap. If you say a word repeatedly, they’ll attempt their own version. This imitation isn’t mindless repetition. It relies on that same mirror mechanism active since birth, now refined by months of social experience. Your baby is watching what you do, mapping it onto their own body, and attempting to reproduce it.
What Counts as a Delay
Every baby develops on their own schedule, and a few weeks’ variation in any milestone is normal. That said, certain patterns are worth paying attention to. A baby who isn’t making eye contact by about three months, who doesn’t smile socially by four months, or who shows no interest in back-and-forth interaction by six months may benefit from an evaluation. By nine months, a baby who doesn’t respond to their name, doesn’t follow your gaze or pointing, or doesn’t use any gestures could be showing signs of a social communication delay.
None of these signs alone means something is wrong. Babies who are more focused on motor milestones like crawling sometimes hit social milestones a little later. But the absence of several social behaviors at once, or a pattern of not engaging with people at all, is worth raising with your pediatrician.
Adjusting for Premature Babies
If your baby was born early, you’ll want to use their “corrected age” rather than their birth date when tracking milestones. To calculate it, subtract the number of weeks your baby was born early from their actual age in weeks. A baby born eight weeks premature who is now four months old has a corrected age of about two months, so you’d expect two-month-level social skills like responsive smiling and basic happy or upset sounds.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends using corrected age for developmental tracking until age two. Their milestone guidelines for preterm babies list social smiling at two months corrected, laughing aloud at four months corrected, and looking when their name is called at six months corrected. Using the corrected age gives you a much more accurate picture of whether your baby’s social development is on track.