Oral exploration – how your baby’s mouth is their key to learning

Babies learn about the world through their mouths. Those little movements from their mouth, lips, and tongue will help them explore and make connections that will support their development as they grow. 

Let's take a look at some of the things your baby learns about as they move their very busy mouths: 

Speech – these early actions and movements are important for the development of their oral muscles, which will help them when they begin to explore sounds and speech.  

Muscle strength – as they make small movements, the muscles in their jaw and mouth strengthen and eventually help them when speaking and eating. During breastfeeding or bottle feeding, your baby will suck and swallow using muscles in their tongue, lips, and jaw, helping them make stronger coordinated movements. 

Sensory input – the brain processes sensory information from their mouth, allowing it to learn and understand how to respond to different experiences. 

As they start to discover and learn about using their mouths to explore the world, you'll start to see them pulling funny faces and sucking on all kinds of things; it may become difficult to resist watching these little movements and you’ll probably find yourself mirroring the little motions they make. 

As your baby’s fine and gross motor skills develop, they’ll start to put things in their mouths, which means they’ll find out so much more!  

Some of the things they’ll be finding out about over the next few months. 

Textures – they’ll find out that objects can be hard, soft, smooth, rough and bumpy. 

Taste – their sense of taste will be very sensitive at the moment, and they may start to tell the difference between sweet and sour.  

Heat – popping things in their mouths helps your baby learn about the temperature of objects.  

Shape and size – objects are all different shapes and sizes, and your baby will begin to discover that there’s a huge difference between them.