Dr. Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, discovered that newborns imitate, and built from that finding a theory of how children learn from the people around them. This article looks at what his work means for the under-5 in your house.
Andrew Meltzoff is co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, one of the world's leading centres for research on the developing brain. His place in the science of early childhood rests on a discovery that rewrote the textbooks: newborn babies imitate. Long before they can speak, point or sit up, infants can watch another person's face and reproduce what they see on their own. The standard view had been that imitation arrived slowly, well into the first year or later. Meltzoff showed it is there from the very beginning.
Why does that matter beyond the laboratory? Because it changes what a baby is. A newborn who can imitate is not a passive bundle waiting for development to switch on. She arrives already equipped with a learning mechanism, already tuned to the most informative thing in her environment, which is other people. Meltzoff has spent his career following that thread: from the first imitations of a newborn, through the copying games of toddlerhood, to a general account of how young children use the people around them as their first and best source of knowledge.
Meltzoff's central claim is that imitation is the infant's first curriculum. From the earliest weeks of life, children learn by watching real people act and then mapping those actions onto their own bodies. When a baby sees you open your mouth or move your tongue, something remarkable happens: she connects what her eyes are seeing on your face with what her muscles can do on hers, despite never having seen her own face at all. That mapping, from your body to her body, is the foundation. On it the child builds everything else: gestures, tool use, words, customs, the thousand small competencies that make up a culture.
The second part of the claim is just as important. Children do not copy indiscriminately. Meltzoff describes a "like me" framework: from infancy, children are most attentive to, and learn most readily from, people they perceive as like themselves. The recognition runs in both directions. The baby sees you act and understands the action through her own body; she acts and watches you respond. Other people are not just objects that move. They are creatures like her, and that likeness is the bridge across which learning travels. Research at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences has developed this framework across infancy and early childhood, and one of its consistent themes is that this kind of learning thrives in live interaction: a real person, present and responsive, acting where the child can watch, join in and be answered.
The source
Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington · Read the original
Put the two ideas together and you get a picture of early learning that is older than any classroom. The child watches someone she identifies with do something real. She tries it with her own hands. The adult responds, adjusts, does it again. Round and round the loop goes, and with every pass the child's version gets closer to the adult's. No one designed this curriculum. It is what children come built to do, and the adults a child loves are its teaching staff whether they applied for the job or not.
The first implication is humbling and useful in equal measure: you are being watched, and the watching is the lesson. A child under five learns less from what you tell her and more from what she sees you do. The way you stir a pot, answer the door, treat the dog and lose at snakes and ladders is all syllabus. That is not a reason for guilt. It is a reason for confidence: the most powerful educational resource in your child's life is already installed in your home, and it is you.
The second implication concerns what kind of demonstration works. If children learn most readily from people they perceive as like themselves, in live interaction, then presence matters. A person in the room, whose actions can be watched from any angle, interrupted, copied badly and repeated on request, offers something different in kind from a face on a screen that cannot see the child back, cannot respond to her attempt and cannot slow down when she fumbles. The honest caveat belongs here: this is a framework for how learning works, not a tariff of harms. The point is about where the richest learning happens, and the answer is in the loop, where the child acts and a real person answers.
The third implication is the most practical. You do not need to teach. You need to do things, visibly, and let your child in. Imitation is not a lesson the adult delivers; it is an apprenticeship the child serves, and the only entry requirement is being allowed near the work.
Watch a two year old in a kitchen where someone is cooking. She does not want a toy from the other room. She wants a wooden spoon and a bowl, and she wants to stand on a chair next to you and stir, because stirring is what the person she loves is doing. Give her the spoon and the apprenticeship begins: the too-big grip, the eyes flicking from your hand to hers, the small correction, the stir again. This is do-as-I-do play, the original apprenticeship. Every trade in history was passed on this way, hand watching hand, long before anyone wrote anything down.
Traditional toys are tools for exactly this loop. A wooden hammer bench works because you tap a peg and she taps a peg, your thud answered by hers. A stacking tower works because you place a ring, slowly, where she can see, and she reaches for the next one. The materials matter more than they look like they should. A beech block has weight; it presses into a toddler's palm the way it presses into yours, so her body can feel what your body felt, which is the "like me" bridge made out of timber. Jaques London has been making playthings like this since 1795, the world's oldest games company, and the quietest virtue of a simple wooden toy is that it has room for two: one demonstrating, one copying, taking turns at the same honest piece of work.
So the practice is almost embarrassingly simple. Sit on the floor. Stack a tower slowly and let her try her own. Tap the pegs and hand over the hammer. Stir, pour, sort and sweep where she can see, and accept the small shadow at your elbow wanting a go. None of it needs narrating. The watching and the trying are doing the work.
The best starting point is the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, where Meltzoff's research on imitation and early learning is gathered. On this site, the case continues in why real play matters, the companion piece on pretend play, which is where imitation grows into imagination, and the practical guidance in our screen time guide on why live interaction is hard to substitute.
Yes, and it is harder than it looks. To copy your expression, a baby has to translate what she sees on your face into movements of her own face, which she has never seen. Meltzoff's discovery was that newborns can do this from the start. Each round of the game is an early conversation, building the connection between other people's actions and her own that later learning runs on.
Screens can show actions, but Meltzoff's "like me" framework points at what they cannot do: see your child back. The richest imitative learning happens in live interaction, where the adult notices the attempt, slows down, repeats and responds. A video plays on regardless. That responsiveness, not the moving picture, does the heavy lifting, which is why a few minutes of copying games on the kitchen floor outweighs a great deal of watching.
Entirely, and it is the system working as designed. A child built to learn by imitation cannot also filter out the moments you would prefer she missed. The muttered word and the slammed door are copied by the same mechanism as the stirring, the tidying and the please-and-thank-you. The practical response is not to switch the mechanism off, which you cannot, but to give it better material: more visible doing of the things you are happy to see again.
No. You need things that let a small child do a real-looking version of what you do: a spoon and bowl, blocks to stack while you stack, a peg to tap after you tap. Simple wooden toys earn their keep because they behave honestly, the same action giving the same result for her as for you, and they leave room for two pairs of hands. The toy is the workbench. The lesson is you.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.