Babies... Ah the pressure!

Well I have been putting this off long enough. I happen to be a perfectionist so I find the idea of blogging a little stressful. I kept putting it off because I didn't feel I had the perfect thing to write about. Today I am ignoring my nagging ego and writing about babies! (I know at the end of the last post I mentioned the Polyvagal Theory but I'm still working that out so that post will come at a later time.)

A close friend of mine has an eight week old beautiful baby girl. As I hold her and watch her eat, I can't help but wonder what is happening inside. If I keep smiling at her, what fires in her brain? As her eyes search my face is she making connections between food and people, food and comfort, food and smiles? Maybe I should stop smiling. In this case, she is probably just looking at a new face, if she makes any connections at all its likely they are not reinforced because i am not in her life on a daily basis. On the other hand if everyone smiles at her while she eats, perhaps she could associate the feeling of being satisfied with smiles, or any of a million other possible connections that could be made there... It's amazing that we make these connections with no consciousness of making them. Babies are the perfect example of our susceptibility to our environment. Babies have a million things going on in their brains every second. Neurons assigning tasks, or perhaps realizing tasks (it has yet to be proven if neurons come assigned with specific tasks or if they are blank slates which are triggered based on their location which assigns them that task). As we get older, we still have millions of connections being made all day long, but the majority of them are being influenced by connections we have already made in our lives: memories. As a baby we don't have memories yet to tell us what to keep and what to throw out, we can't understand that Mom or Dad or whoever the caregiver may be is having an off day. Basically rational thought is what's missing... obviously. We all know babies don't have rational thought, even most adolescents haven't figured that out yet, but do we really understand what that means? Clearly we don't because we wouldn't put children in jail. The more I learn about our brains and their development, the more terrified I am to become a parent!