MOTHERS’ AND BABIES’ BRAINWAVES SYNCHRONIZE WHEN THEY GAZE AT EACH OTHER
Scientists have discovered that making eye contact with babies synchs their brainwaves with adults and could help them to learn and communicate more easily. Researchers already knew that when parents interact with their children their emotions and heart rate synchronize but they have never tested it with the brain until now. In a study of […]
STUDY SHOWS BABIES WHO GET MORE CUDDLES HAVE THEIR GENETICS CHANGED FOR YEARS
The amount of close and comforting contact that young infants get doesn’t just keep them warm, snug, and loved. A new study says it can actually affect babies at the molecular level, and the effects can last for years. Based on the study, babies who get less physical contact and are more distressed at a […]
BABIES CAN TELL HOW BADLY YOU WANT SOMETHING: PART ONE
According to a new study from MIT and Harvard University, babies as young as 10 months can assess how much someone values a particular goal by observing how hard they are willing to work to achieve it. This ability requires integrating information about both the costs of obtaining a goal and the benefit gained by […]
CRYING BABIES PUSH SAME ‘BUTTONS’ IN MOTHERS’ BRAINS NO MATTER THE CULTURE
This study analyzes videotapes of 684 mothers in 11 countries interacting with their infants, who were around 5 months old. The research found that mothers in 11 countries tend to react the same way to their crying infant—by picking up and talking to the baby—and that the way mothers respond seems to be programmed into […]
FACTS EVERY PARENT SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THEIR BABY’S BRAIN
All babies are born too early If it weren’t for the size limitations of a woman’s pelvis, babies would stay developing in the womb for considerably longer, comparative biologists have suggested. Some pediatricians label a baby’s first three months of life as the “fourth trimester” of pregnancy to emphasize how needy, and yet devoid of […]
BABIES RETAIN THEIR EARLY EXPOSURE TO FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Babies may be more language-savvy than scientists thought: A study of people who were adopted as babies suggests that infants younger than 6 months may grasp crucial abstract information about their native tongue. They seem to store this information for years even if they don’t hear their native language in the interim. In the study, […]
NEWBORN BABIES ALREADY HAVE A SENSE OF HOW NUMBERS WORK
Newborn babies seem to have a rudimentary sense of numbers, preferring smaller numbers on the left and larger ones on the right. The finding suggests that this left-to-right mental number line might be innate for humans. We visualize most of our thoughts in space. “Anything you want to remember that has a sense of order […]
WHY SKIN-TO-SKIN CONTACT WITH INFANTS IS BETTER FOR EVERYONE
Carmela Torres was 18 when she became pregnant for the first time. It was 1987 and she and her now-husband, Pablo Hernandez, were two idealistic young Colombians born in the coastal region of Montería who moved to the capital, Bogotá, in search of freedom and a better life. When Torres told her father she was […]
MOTHERS’ MIGRAINE LINKED TO COLIC IN INFANTS
Researchers report that mothers with migraine are more than twice as likely as those without to have an infant with colic. “Infants that inherit migraine genes may be more sensitive to normal stimuli and express that sensitivity as colicky crying,” lead investigator Amy Gelfand, MD, a child neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, […]
DOES DAD TIME WITH INFANTS BOOST BABIES’ IQ?
A new study suggests that if you’re a new father, spending plenty of time with your baby could boost his or her mental development. British researchers looked at how 128 fathers interacted with their infants at 3 months of age. When the kids turned 2, the researchers measured their mental development. Infants whose fathers were […]