Sensory perception allows us to receive and integrate information from the environment, a process that starts right from birth. Indeed, newborns can interact with their environment and perform sensorimotor tasks soon after birth, without any previous experience of patterned sensory input. Understanding how neurons assemble into circuits that developmentally prepare to encode visual information accordingly to arousal states is still poorly understood and is likely to provide critical insight not only into how these circuits function, but also how they malfunction in various neurological conditions.It has been previously reported that spontaneous and sensory-evoked cortical activity is highly arousal state-dependent in adult rodent primary visual cortex (V1). However, relatively little is known about how arousal state influence on cortical network dynamic emerges through early postnatal development. To study this critical question, we recorded V1 spontaneous and sensory-evoked neuronal population activity from before to after eye-opening by combining both in vivo head-fixed, electrophysiological extracellular recording and 2P calcium imaging. In vivo V1 activity was recorded along with the monitoring of facial motion to assess the transition between stillness and high facial movement arousal states. Before eye-opening, we observed that both spontaneous and sensory-evoked activity dynamics are not influenced by high facial motion arousal state. While at eye-opening onset both spontaneous and visually-evoked activity get enhanced by high arousal state, in line with what has been previously described in the adult V1. Our findings suggest that eye-opening witnesses a developmental turning point for high arousal state influence onto cortical network dynamics.