What’s Going on in There? summary

Today, there’s no shortage of guidebooks filled with advice on what to do during pregnancy. Of course, all children and mothers are different, but these discussions are important. After all, pregnancy and birth are crucial stages in human development.

Mothers’ behavior during pregnancy can have lifelong consequences for their children. Regular consumption of alcohol can cause mental retardation in newborns, while over-the-counter drugs such as Aspirin can have devastating effects on unborn children, with the potential to cause internal bleeding, for example.

Do babies enjoy the tickling and cheek-pinching as much as we do? Well, it turns out it’s actually good for them.

Stimulating an infant’s sense of touch is a necessary part of healthy development. Several studies show that preterm infants even benefit from daily massages, showing faster weight gain and better performance in visual recognition tests. Without this stimulation, the corresponding parts of a child’s brain will degenerate.

Have you ever had a cold and not been able to taste what you knew was a delicious meal? It can be extremely frustrating! Taste and smell are vital sensory functions for humans in general, and this begins in babies from their time in the womb.

Even as fetuses, babies can process information about their mother’s smell. This becomes crucial for their sense of orientation – babies use it to work out where their mothers’ arms are, as their body scent is most present under the armpits. An infant’s sense of smell also allows for self-soothing, which unwashed newborns practice by raising their hands to their mouths, comforting themselves with their own smell.

Imagine watching a film where the images and sound aren’t synced – it’s very confusing or irritating, right? This is because our hearing and vision are deeply connected. But as infants, we rely far more on sound than we do on sight.

Babies enter the world with great hearing skills. While in the womb, fetuses listen closely and even form memories of the things they hear from the outside world. In one study, pregnant mothers were asked to read The Cat in the Hat out loud several times a day. They read the story to their babies shortly after birth, and the newborns responded by sucking more excitedly on their pacifiers as they listened.

If you’ve got a crying baby in your hands, the best way to calm it is rocking it gently in your arms. Babies also calm down enough to fall asleep when we push them around in carriages because they love the feeling of being in motion.

Experiences of motion satisfy a baby’s need for stimulation. They can handle motion well too, because they’re born with a well-developed sense of balance. This, in turn, allows babies to observe their environment from a very young age, as their brains are able to make sense of visual changes when they move their heads.

Much of what we love in other people has to do with their charming personalities and little quirks. What parent wouldn’t want their child to grow up into a loveable person? Of course, while some things are determined genetically, other aspects of a human’s character can be shaped by childhood experiences.

All babies begin smiling at the sound of other people’s voices at around six months of age, and not only their parents’. This is called social smiling, and even blind babies develop this innate tendency around the same time. However, babies also exhibit stranger anxiety from six months of age, largely because they start moving around independently at that time, too.

How is it that we learned our mother tongue so easily as kids, while learning new languages today is so hard? Well, babies have the upper hand here – they’re predisposed to learning languages.

Babies all around the world begin to understand the meaning of their first words at around nine months of age. In their second year, they begin to comprehend words more rapidly, and learn about eight words each day between two and six years of age.

From psychology to preschool pedagogy, experts from all fields claim to have unlocked the secrets of intelligence in children. However, defining intelligence itself is a very challenging task. This is evident in the difficulty we have when it comes to measuring how “smart” children are.

Most scientists believe that a single factor called general intelligence influences most skills. IQ tests are designed to assess general intelligence but, of course, infants can’t take IQ tests. So how can we determine whether a child’s intellect is developing at a healthy rate?