Human infant development is a nonlinear, dynamic, and complex process inherently embedded within the surrounding environment — both physical and social. During the first thousand days from conception, newborns become infants and later children. Through continuous interactions with their environment, they construct meanings about themselves, others, and their connections to others. Parenting — including caregiving gestures, thoughts, and emotional states—forms a unique and critical component of this surrounding environment. Infants are particularly sensitive to these interactions, which ultimately serve as both a regulatory buffer against other environmental stimuli and a transducer that facilitates their meaning-making processes. I refer to this proximal parenting environment as the parentome to emphasize its connection to various omics-related mechanisms, through which the interactions between an infant and their environment become embedded in their emerging phenotype — day by day, year by year. Today, advances in psychobiological and neuroscientific research allow us to develop a fine-tuned, deep, and multi-layered understanding of the mechanisms through which the parentome shapes human development. In my talk, I will focus on a selection of these mechanisms: from behavioral epigenetic regulation triggered by prenatal or neonatal stress to autonomic system coupling during smartphone-induced interference in mother-infant interactions; from multisensory exchanges during parent-child exploration of physical objects to the early emergence of inter-brain synchrony patterns during face-to-face interactions. Finally, I will discuss the implications of parentome science for educational and clinical settings, particularly for infants and parents facing developmental health and well-being risks. Taken together, these studies suggest that humans are highly susceptible — perhaps even fragile? — in response to environmental stimuli and that human-to-human connections are the key resource for fostering and protecting development and psychological well-being. Parents — and infant caregivers in general — are not merely a set of skills to be trained; they are a place, the space where development unfolds. Joining efforts to cultivate a shared culture of parental care is
essential if we aim to raise new generations capable of fostering collaborative and nurturing relationships.