New Babies Are Smarter Than You Think
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
1.
A few years ago a young mother watched her husband diaper their first-born
son. “You don’t have to be so grim about it,” she protested. “You can talk to him and
smile a little.” The father, who happened to be a psychologist, answered firmly, “He
has nothing to say to me, and I have nothing to say to him.” Most people, indeed,
believe the newborn to be passive, near blind, and utterly helpless creatures.
2.
Psychologists now know how wrong that father was. Today university
laboratories across the country are studying newborns in their first month of life. As a
result, psychologists now describe the new baby as perceptive, with remarkable
learning abilities and an even more remarkable capacity to shape his or her
environment – including the attitudes and actions of his parents. Some researchers
believe that the neonatal period may even be the most significant four weeks in an
entire lifetime.
3.
Far from being helpless, the newborn knows what he likes and rejects what he
doesn’t. He shuts out unpleasant sensations by closing his eyes or averting his face.
He is a glutton for novelty. He prefers animate things over inanimate and likes people
more than anything.
4.
At the end of a week, a newborn recognizes something familiar about the
mother who has fed him from birth. If she is silent, her face covered with a mask with
eye holes, he refuses the nipple at first, takes less nourishment, and has trouble
drifting off to sleep afterward. And by four weeks, infants are already able to
recognize subtle differences in language sounds and can distinguish baa from paa.
5.
All five of a baby’s senses are in working order from the moment of birth. The
newborn can distinguish color from black and white, and if you move an object
slowly before his face, his eyes and even his head will follow it. The eyes may focus,
however, only if the object is very close, about seven inches. Even on the delivery
table, a newborn is alert, eyes shining with interest, and will gaze into its mother’s
eyes.
6.
Hearing is even more acute. Shake a rattle, and the newborn turns his head
toward the sound. He startles at a sudden loud noise. He prefers to hear voices,
attending to the sound of speech with more interest than to a pure tone. When an
infant’s cry brings a quick response, he starts to learn the purpose of language. In fact,
babies who get a prompt and loving reaction to their wails in the first month cry less
and communicate more in other ways toward the end of their first year. Other senses –
taste, smell, touch – are equally acute.
7.
You may wonder how the psychologists know all this – how they find out the
interests and preferences of speechless infants. The first thing they did was to stop
believing theories about how uncoordinated a newborn’s brain ought to be, and to
start watching how he acted. One psychologist observed every movement of four
New Babies / 2
40
45
50
55
60
65
70
75
babies, each for eighteen hours at a stretch. Others adapted instruments to record
changes in heart rate and respiration that reveal the intensity of the infants’ responses.
Other machines measured the character and strength of the infants’ sucking and
monitored every sneeze and startle.
8.
At Brown University, for example, Dr. Einer Siqueland has rigged up an
ingenious device to allow a newborn to reveal his viewing preferences by sucking.
Propped in an infant seat, the baby sucks on a pacifier while simple pictures – a
triangle, a circle, a square – are flashed on a screen in front of him. It takes him barely
three minutes to learn that when he sucks hard, he sees the picture sharply, but as he
slows down, the pictures fade. Controlling his own experience – which he prefers – he
sucks vigorously to see the first drawing, then stops as he loses interest. But when a
new picture is flashed, the sucking intensity quickens again. Suck by suck, he tells the
psychologist that he perceives two forms as different, that he has visual memory –
over a brief span, at least – and by the length of time he sucks, that he finds one
picture more interesting than another.
9.
One conclusion is clear: Infants differ in significant ways from the moment of
birth. By his own unique temperament, the newborn shapes his early environment.
Obviously a baby who sleeps six hours out of eight will have a different set of
experiences from one who sleeps only two hours. And the baby who is quiet and
undemanding will receive a different response from one who is vigorous and
peremptory in his cries. How irritable a newborn is, how placid, how stubborn or
malleable, apathetic or alert – all of these traits affect the quantity and quality of his
early experience.
10. An important corollary to the knowledge that each new baby is an individual is
a realization that his temperament influences his mother’s style of loving and coping –
and this in turn affects the infant. It’s a constant circular process that starts in the very
first days and may have profound effects on the child’s later mental health. An
irritable baby matched with a hypertense mother may lead to a blowup; an apathetic
baby with a depressed mother may suffer from neglect. The observation that a mother
who batters one child often treats a sibling tenderly may be explained by a personality
mismatch that started at birth. “This baby is different. I never could warm to him,”
some mothers admit later.
11. Does an alert baby make his mother more sensitive to his needs, or does a
sensitive mother produce an alert baby? After studying 134 mothers and their
newborns, aged two to four days, Dr. Joy Osofsky was unable to reach a final
conclusion. “The attentive, sensitive mother tends to have a responsive baby, or the
responsive baby tends to pull attentive, sensitive behavior from the mother,” she and
Barbara Danziger wrote in a preliminary report. Recently, Dr. Osofsky told me, “The
alert babies looked more at the mother, gave her more cues. Then the mother would
smile at the baby, touch her cheek, bounce her. There was a pattern of responsivity
New Babies / 3
80
85
90
95
100
105
110
115
back and forth. These mothers were even the most sensitive to the time to burp the
baby.”
12. All mothers are likely to be more tender, concludes another important study, if
allowed to make friends with the infant at the moment their free-floating love is
peaking directly after birth. But how can one latch onto and love a baby who is
immediately whisked away to the nursery, glimpsed briefly after twelve hours, and
then seen only every four hours at daytime feedings? This is a significant problem,
according to Dr. Marshall Klaus and Dr. Kennell, pediatricians at Case-Western
Reserve University Medical School.
13. Other mammals, the two doctors explain, tend their young immediately after
birth. In fact, if a lamb is briefly removed from the ewe in the first few hours, the
mother often butts the baby away or refuses to care for it later. Drs. Klaus and Kennell
call this the “maternal sensitive period,” and they point out that a newborn is uniquely
ready to meet his mother directly after birth. Often he is alert, wide-eyed: some
newborns remain awake for an hour and a half – a period not equaled until the end of
the first month. If the mother places herself at the infant’s eye level, the newborn will
look directly at her – it’s literally love at first sight. Mothers report this as a
profoundly moving experience. “I felt she really knew me,” one mother said, “and I
thrilled all over.”
14. Now let us see what could happen to the mothers who are kept away from their
infants for weeks, even months, because the babies are premature or ill at birth. Drs.
Klaus and Kennell believe this separation may be one cause for the profound disorder
in mothering that later produces a neglected or battered child. One study shows that
while only 7 percent of white babies are premature, 39 percent of white battered
babies are premature – over five times the expected number.
15. Mothers of infants in incubators cannot hold their babies and often don’t want to
touch them. “Once I touch her, I’ll feel close and she might die,” one explained. They
leave the hospital alone and slip back into old routines. They are apprehensive when
they eventually fetch a strange fragile infant home from the hospital. Doctors are
deeply concerned about these hindrances to the development of mother love, and a
number of hospitals now invite mothers into the premature nursery, encouraging them
to touch and feed their infants in the incubator.
16. The care of an infant in its first month of life has today taken on vast new
dimensions. Perhaps the essential lesson is to respect the unique style of each complex
tiny human.
New Babies / 4
Answer the questions below in your own words in English unless otherwise
stated.
1.
The psychologist quoted in the first paragraph represents a certain attitude; what
is it?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
2.
Paragraph 2 points to a change in attitude; what do modern psychologists
(paragraph 2) think about newborn babies nowadays?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
Choose the best answer
3.
Paragraph 3 suggests that newborn babies have
a. no sense of smell or taste.
b. definite likes and dislikes.
c. no curiosity.
d. no liking for novelty.
4.
How does a newborn (paragraph 4) react when its mother looks different, or
behaves in a different manner?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
Complete the sentence below
5.
People mistakenly believe (paragraph 5) that newborn babies are blind, because
________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________ .
Choose the best answer
6.
Paragraphs 3-6 (inclusive) mainly illustrate
a. the passivity and helplessness of newborn babies.
b. the intelligence of newborn babies.
c. the dullness of the newborn babies.
d. the affectionate nature of newborn babies.
e. the fact that the newborn react to all sensory stimuli.
7.
What does the experiment described in paragraph 8 teach us?
a. It shows that babies can suck vigorously.
b. It shows that babies will not react to pleasant or unpleasant experiences.
c. It shows that babies have no preferences.
d. It shows that babies have clear preferences.
New Babies / 5
8.
What is the main idea in paragraph 9?
Answer:
a. It is hard to tell one baby from another.
b. A temperamental baby could easily reshape its environment.
c. The quiet baby receives least care.
d. Babies are distinguishable right after birth.
9.
Give examples of a personality mismatch (paragraph 10)
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
Choose the best answer
10. The possibility of an interaction (paragraph 11) between the mother’s qualities
and the babies’ responses is
a. fully explained.
b. still being studied.
c. questioned by psychologists.
d. denied by most people.
Answer the questions below
11. Under the present circumstances (paragraph 12) most mothers do not find a
natural outlet for their maternal love immediately after birth; why?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
12. The immediate separation of mothers from their babies (paragraphs 14-15) may
lead to undesirable phenomena; what are they?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
13. How do doctors (paragraph 15) try to prevent the undesirable phenomena
described in paragraph 14?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
Complete the sentence below
14. In the context of this passage, Each complex tiny human (paragraph 16, last
line) refers to _____________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________ .