How Your Baby Learns to Love You

The answer that springs to mind may be the first day of preschool or kindergarten: the first time kids are in a classroom with a teacher. Or perhaps you’ve called to mind the toddler phase, when children are learning to walk, and talk, and eat with a fork. Maybe you’ve encountered the “Zero to Three” movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones, so your answer to the question would be: Learning begins at birth.

The correct answer may surprise you. You may even find it implausible — though it’s supported by the latest research from biology and psychology. And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we’re born, in the womb. When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they are clean slates, unmarked by life — when in fact they have already been shaped by us, and by the particular environments we live in.

First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers’ voices. Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother’s abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month, are muted and muffled. One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. But the pregnant woman’s own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily, and because the fetus is always with her, it hears her voice a lot. Once it’s born, it recognizes the sound of her voice, and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else’s.

How can we know this? Newborn babies can’t do much, but one thing they’re really good at is sucking. Researchers in these experiments rigged up a pair of rubber nipples so that if the baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother’s voice through a pair of headphones. If it sucks on the other nipple, it hears the voice of a female stranger. Babies quickly make their preference known by choosing the first one.

Read more: http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/how-your-baby-learns-to-love-you-and-more-in-the-womb-2518469/