Infant Reflexes: How They Build Your Baby’s Brain

What Reflexes Actually Are

Reflexes are simply automatic movement patterns that all humans are born with, that help us survive. Your baby isn’t choosing to move their head toward your breast or open their mouth wide when they’re first born, or trying to communicate that they’re hungry — the part of their brain needed for that level of active choice isn’t developed yet.

Their body is simply responding to built-in reflexive programs that live deep in the most primitive parts of the brain. This is how babies come into the world already wired to breathe, move, feed, and survive.

When a baby feels, hears, or experiences a reflexive cue, they respond in a predictable way: startling with loud noises, turning their head when you stroke their cheek, or bobbing up and down on your chest when they’re ready to feed. Reflexes show up consistently across all babies — which is exactly why pediatricians check reflexes as part of your baby’s developmental exam at birth.

And that’s also why understanding them is so helpful. While a baby doesn’t use their reflexes to communicate intentionally, when we know what these reflexes are and how they’re showing up, we can start to see what they’re telling us about how our baby is developing — or where they might be struggling.

Some reflexes, like breathing, stay with us for life. Others are designed to help your baby build specific skills. Once that skill is built, the reflex fades into the background, back into the brainstem where it always remains — but no longer needs to drive movement because your baby has gained voluntary control.

How Reflexes Build Your Baby’s Brain

Now that you understand what reflexes are, let’s talk about what they do underneath the surface layer of movement.

Even before you ever felt your baby move for the first time, reflexes were already at work building something incredible: your baby’s brain.

Every time a reflex fires and causes movement, it helps build the connection between that part of your baby’s body and their brain. Some reflexes start and complete much of their work while your baby is still in the womb. Others begin before birth but continue wiring after delivery. And as your baby moves through the first year, more complex reflexes emerge as your baby gains the muscle memory that earlier reflexes laid the foundation for.

All of that muscle memory comes from reflexive movement patterns.

Think of it like the development of a highway system. In the beginning, those connections are barely pathways — like game trails winding through a forest. They’re there, but they’re rough and clunky to navigate.

Over time, as your baby repeats those movements, the trail gets worn in. Eventually, with enough practice, that little trail becomes a well-traveled road — and then eventually, a fully paved highway. That’s what allows movement to feel smooth, coordinated, and easy. This is exactly how muscle memory develops — and reflexes are what kickstart the process.

As your baby builds muscle memory in one group of muscles, the next set of reflexes helps make branches off those original pathways, connecting all of those little highways together as the brain keeps building and organizing.

This doesn’t just help coordinate physical movement — it’s how your baby connects vision, hearing, emotions, and body regulation too. So when your baby turns their head to root or lifts their head to look at you during feeding, they’re not just showing feeding cues. They’re actively building brain connections that support development far beyond feeding alone.

Reflexes Help Connect the Brain and Body

Not all reflexes are limited to helping one group of muscles move. Some reflexes work to help your baby’s brain learn how to coordinate different muscles together.

When two parts of the brain activate at the same time, they build a connection between those areas. You’ve probably heard the phrase: “neurons that fire together wire together.” Reflexes that cause multiple groups of muscles to fire together — like the Moro reflex, where the arms extend and the fingers and toes splay — are actively building connections between those body parts and the emotional regulation centers of the brain.

This is exactly how your baby’s brain starts linking different functions — laying the foundation for more complex movements like rolling, crawling, and walking, while also connecting vision, hearing, and emotional processing with movement.

The more groups of muscles move together, the more those internal brain connections strengthen — turning the isolated little trails we talked about in the last section into a more fully integrated network.

It’s the same process, just happening on a bigger scale as your baby grows — and it all depends on reflexes being able to do their job.

Reflexes in Action: The Birth Crawl

If you’ve ever seen a newborn do a “birth crawl,” you’ve watched reflexes at work in real time. When placed skin-to-skin on the parent’s chest, a baby will bob, turn, kick, bend, and slowly work their way up to the breast. Nobody teaches them how to do this — their reflexes are coordinating the entire process.

Head movement, rooting, flexion, extension — it’s all happening automatically, driven by the brainstem. This is your baby’s brain using reflexive movement to meet its most basic needs: feeding, breathing, connecting, and regulating.

Feeding nourishes your baby’s body. But movement is what nourishes your baby’s brain.

The biggest thing most people miss about the birth crawl is that it isn’t the only time your baby can move to feed — it’s simply the first time we see it in action. Even if your baby didn’t get the chance to do a birth crawl right after delivery, it’s not too late. You can always create that opportunity later. Anytime you and your newborn are calm and comfortable, you can place them on your belly and let them naturally work their way up to the breast.

It’s always incredible to watch.

When Movement Doesn't Happen

If reflexive movement helps your baby build brain connections, what happens if they don’t get enough chances to move?

The brain works a little like a competitive land grab. When all of the reflexes are working well, movement patterns develop evenly — the different muscles fire, the connections form, and the brain’s “real estate” is balanced and organized. The more a pathway gets used, the stronger and more permanent its space becomes.

But if a reflex isn’t firing fully, or if certain muscles aren’t moving because of tension, guarding, or connection issues, that area doesn’t get its fair share of brain development. Instead, other muscles (and the compensations they create) start getting used more frequently to make up for what’s missing. Over time, the brain gives those over-used pathways more space, simply because they’re getting used more often.

Clinically, this is what we call a compensation — a movement pattern that shows up because the intended pattern isn’t fully accessible. As adults, we see this when someone lifts with their back instead of their legs because their core muscles aren’t firing well. The compensation takes over, and the more we use it, the stronger and more automatic it becomes.

This is why early intervention can make such a big difference. The longer a compensation runs the show, the more brain space it occupies, and the harder it becomes to reset those patterns later. This is exactly why many PTs and OTs recommend addressing head preferences or early asymmetries like torticollis sooner rather than later. When you catch them early, you can usually redirect movement patterns with simple support. If they hang around too long, they become harder to shift — and can sometimes lead to additional downstream issues like flattened heads or postural imbalances.

This is why balanced, full-body movement matters so much. We want a brain that’s evenly connected — with highways running in all directions, sharing information easily across different parts of the brain. That’s what allows for smooth movement, easier learning, better feeding, and stronger emotional regulation.

The good news? Your baby already has all the information built into their system to make this happen. The reflexes are there. The pathways are waiting to be built. They just need the opportunity to move — and your support to help make sure those opportunities are happening.

How This Impacts Feeding (and Latching)

This is exactly why there’s often a disconnect between what we’re told should be “natural” and how feeding actually feels in real life.

The way we often approach feeding isn’t fully based on how infants reflexively feed. Instead, we’ve developed systems that try to do the work for the baby — guiding, holding, and directing them — rather than working with their reflexes to help feeding happen the way their brain is wired for.

Other mammals don’t feed their babies like we do. They don’t place milk directly into the baby’s mouth like feeding a baby bird. They allow the baby to use reflexive movements to find the breast, open wide, latch, and feed. Humans are wired to do this too — but our approach often skips the reflexive piece entirely.

And when those early feeding reflexes aren’t able to engage fully, they can’t do their job. The rooting reflex that helps babies turn their head side to side isn’t just a hunger cue — it’s part of how the brain learns to coordinate head and neck movement. The reflexive gape helps organize the jaw, tongue, and head into position. Each reflex is helping the baby’s brain understand what to do next.

When we skip over the reflexes, we unintentionally disorganize the process. It becomes harder for babies to use their built-in programs, because they aren’t receiving the right sequence of cues. And that leads to frustration — for both the baby and the parent — when feeds feel like a struggle and nothing seems to work.

This is why so much feeding advice around positioning can unintentionally lead us astray. We’re often taught where to place our hands and how to hold the baby — but the real goal isn’t just getting the baby into a specific position. The goal is helping your baby get into a position where their reflexes can engage and organize the way they’re designed to.

Positioning still matters — but it only works when paired with reflexive readiness. You can place your baby perfectly, but if their reflexes aren’t organizing well, feeding may still feel off.

One of the most important reflexes for latching is the gaping reflex. This is the reflex that helps your baby open wide before they latch. It’s triggered when your baby’s chin touches the chest — sending the message: “open wide now.” When this reflex fires fully, your baby opens wide, brings the tongue forward, and moves into a deeper, more effective latch.

But if the reflex doesn’t fire fully or we get it out of order, it can cause latching to feel feel shallow, painful, or disorganized. When we support reflexes during feeding,  we’re helping create the right conditions for so baby's reflexes can fire, making it easy for their brain and body do what they’re already wired to do.

What Gets In the Way of Reflexes Doing Their Job

The most common thing that limits reflexive development is simple: lack of movement. Anything that limits how much your baby can move — especially through their full range of motion — can interfere with how well their reflexes are able to map the brain.

• Latching and feeding that circumvents reflexes
• Prolonged swaddling or overly restrictive swaddling
• Prolonged container use (swings, bouncers, car seats, etc.)
• Birth trauma (forceps, vacuum deliveries, surgical births)
• Guarding tension from pain, soreness, or discomfort from womb positioning

None of these are inherently bad or avoidable, and all of them have an important purpose for the infant. But when they limit movement for long periods of time, it reduces the number of times reflexes get to fire, which slows down brain mapping.

The very best thing for your baby’s development is often simple: free movement. Every little wiggle, stretch, and turn is your baby’s brain doing its work. As much as you can, as often as you can. In the blog below, I get into way more detail about how to do exactly that.

Moving Forward with Confidence

The most important thing to remember is that reflexes don’t require perfection — they just need opportunity. Your baby’s brain already holds the blueprint. The reflexes are ready to do their work. And every time your baby gets to move, explore, and engage, you’re helping them build the strong brain-body connections they need to thrive.

If feeding has felt harder than you expected, you haven’t missed your chance. You’re not behind. You’re simply learning how your baby’s brain and body work — and once you start seeing feeding and movement through the lens of reflexes, it all starts to make more sense.

You don’t have to get everything perfect to help your baby thrive. You just need to give them chances to move, and the support to help those reflexes do what they’re designed to do.