Best Beginnings Episode 3: Professor Emily Jones on what babies' brains are really telling us

If you've ever watched your baby and wondered whether what you're seeing is "normal," you're in very good company. Most parents wonder. And the science of how babies actually develop, what their brains are doing and what their behaviour is telling us, turns out to have more reassurance in it than you might expect.

Professor Emily Jones has spent more than twenty years trying to connect that science to the daily lives of families. She's Professor of Neuroscience at King's College London, leads the BOND Lab (Brain and Online Neuroimaging for Development), and is the principal investigator of BASIS, the British Autism Study of Infant Siblings. Her team has followed hundreds of babies from around six months of age through into childhood, tracking how their brains and behaviour develop over time. A lot of what researchers once assumed about that development has had to be rethought.

"Every child deserves to be understood, not just assessed." — Professor Emily Jones

That sentence sits at the heart of how Emily talks about her work.

The BASIS study follows babies who have an older autistic sibling, a group with a higher likelihood of being autistic themselves than the general population. When the research began, researchers expected the babies who went on to be diagnosed with autism to show social differences from the very earliest months, struggling to engage with their parents from the start. The data didn't show that at all.

In infancy, these babies were interacting, looking at their parents and smiling much like any other baby. The differences that emerged early on weren't social. They were sensory. Autistic people have long described how much sensory experience shapes daily life, and the data now shows this is visible long before any social markers are. The lights are too bright. The room is too loud. The fabric feels wrong.

Which means, in a quietly important way, that adjusting the sensory environment around a child doesn't require a diagnosis or a referral or a place on a waiting list. It just requires paying attention to what the child is telling you through their behaviour. Any parent or carer or early years worker can start there, today, with no training and no permission from anyone.

There's another finding from BASIS that matters just as much. Developmental trajectories aren't fixed. Some children in the study didn't meet the criteria for autism at three but did by seven or eight. Others showed clear differences early on and fewer as they grew. There are likely several different developmental pathways, and the science is still working out what they look like. In practice, a snapshot at two doesn't tell you where a child will end up.

This matters for the parents we see every week at Babyzone, who watch their children grow and sometimes worry whether every small difference means something permanent. It usually doesn't. You can be right that something is there, and also right that it isn't fixed. Those two things sit together more easily than they sound.

The episode also explores a distinction that causes real confusion for families: the difference between early identification and early labelling. Noticing that a child might benefit from extra support isn't the same as pursuing a formal diagnosis, and Emily is clear that the decision about whether to seek a diagnosis is an individual one. Some families are comfortable waiting, knowing that autism is a different way of being in the world and that their child can decide for themselves later on whether they want a label. Others need a diagnosis to unlock the support and resources their child needs right now.

Ideally, Emily says, support would be based on need rather than on a categorical label. The system isn't there yet. But children who would benefit from extra support can usually be identified well before a formal diagnosis catches up with them, and the long wait for assessment doesn't have to mean a long wait for help.

This is part of why we work the way we do. Through our Portage partnership in Barking & Dagenham, specialist practitioners are at Babyzone all day, every week, alongside the families who come through our doors. They work with children showing early signs of autism, additional needs or speech delay. That means making referrals, running home visits and speech and language sessions, helping parents with behaviour strategies and EHCP applications, and bringing children into the sensory room for one-to-one time. None of it requires a diagnosis first. It's support that meets the child where they are, which is what Emily's research has been pointing towards for years.

Sleep comes up in the episode too, and it'll resonate with most families of young children. Most babies start consolidating their sleep over the first year, but for babies who are later diagnosed with autism, that doesn't always happen in the same way. By around 10 to 14 months, Emily's data shows them sleeping roughly an hour less per night than their peers. That's a meaningful difference for everyone in the house, and because sleep matters so much for how the brain consolidates learning during the day, the implications stretch beyond tiredness. The hopeful part is that sleep is something families can actually be supported with.

Boys are diagnosed with autism more often than girls, and Emily's studies reflect that pattern in early childhood. But when researchers follow the same children into mid-childhood rather than assessing them only at three, more girls begin to meet the criteria. Autism in girls is often recognised later, and one likely factor is masking. That's the way some autistic people, particularly girls and women, learn to suppress or hide their autistic traits in order to fit in. Masking has been linked to poorer mental health outcomes. Emily is clear that she doesn't want support programmes to teach children, even unintentionally, that they have to hide who they are. Her team is researching how early masking begins and what it looks like in the brain, so that future support can help children flourish as themselves.

For early years professionals, Emily's advice comes down to one thing: follow the child's lead. It's the active ingredient in the most effective early support programmes. Rather than steering children towards a predetermined way of engaging, the idea is to notice what they're interested in and build from there. If a child is fixated on a spinning top, talk about the top. Join them in their world. It's the same principle that underpins serve-and-return interaction, the back-and-forth exchanges that build brain architecture, and it works for every child.

Emily also addresses the single biggest myth she wants to bust: that vaccines cause autism. They don't. The original study that made the claim was fraudulent and has been thoroughly discredited, and the research since has been unambiguous. The myth keeps circulating anyway, and it does real damage, both to families navigating diagnosis and to public health more broadly.

The episode ends somewhere hopeful. Across her career, Emily has seen society shift in how it talks about neurodiversity. More willingness to listen to autistic voices. Less appetite for stigma. More recognition that difference doesn't need fixing. Better environments, as she puts it, help everybody.

And if you're a parent listening and feeling worried or uncertain about your child's development, Emily's message is this. Every parent worries; that part is normal. But if something feels persistently different, it helps to talk to people. Start with other parents, and then your health visitor or GP if the worry doesn't ease. What tends to matter more than any single observation is change over time. If your child was doing something and has clearly stopped over a sustained period, that's more telling than a difficult day. And you don't have to work any of it out on your own.

The episode is out now. 

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