Whats it like being a baby?

Not yet approved by Nikhil

We have always wondered what's it like being a baby. Now, thank to recent research, we know!

" It's like being in love in Paris after three double espressos,” says Alison Gopnik, a University of Berkeley psychologist, "including waking up crying at 3 in the morning!"

Sure, they may while away their days eating, sleeping and soiling diapers. But it's high time that babies got some respect. Modern research is revolutionizing our understanding of the first years of life, revealing early childhood to be a frenzied period of intellectual, emotional and moral development. "Any child will put the most productive scientist to shame," as she writes about how babies think.“Babies and young children are like the R&D division of the human species." 

“Babies are already as smart as they can be and have incredibly powerful ways of learning about the world."

If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are. But babies take in much more information from different sources than adults do and work very hard to make sense of that information. It's one reason we think babies sleep so much — they're doing much harder work than grown-ups are!

At birth babies' brains have 100 billion neurons  -- as many as they will ever have. As a baby grows, so do these neurons, forming branches that connect with other neurons to transmit signals and share information. Each bit of information a baby takes from his environment stimulates a different part of the brain and reinforces particular neural connections. In the first two months alone, the number of these connections increases from an estimated 50 trillion to 1,000 trillion.

The learning starts with the sounds and sensations a baby experiences before he's even born. At birth, the sense of hearing is more developed than vision. "Full-term infants have the benefit of having heard their mother's voice for weeks preceding delivery and when a newborn hears his mother's voice, he shows a different pattern of brain activity than when he hears a stranger's.

Outward evidence of a baby's learning and thinking is subtle at first: the newborn modifying his sucking to adapt to the breast, bottle, or pacifier; the 3-week-old who takes a break from feeding to look into her mother's eyes. Because a newborn's vision is believed to be no better than 20/400  -- meaning he sees things at 20 feet away as a person with perfect vision would see them from 400 feet away  -- he can focus only on things within seven to ten inches from his face. So he is more attracted to stark contrasts, such as black and white. But as the connections between neurons in the brain's visual cortex increase, a baby begins to see more clearly. His depth perception also develops as he begins to coordinate his eye movements so that both eyes focus on the same thing at the same time. Now a baby may become fascinated by the finer features of a toy or his parents' faces, noticing three-dimensional details rather than looking only at the edges of objects.

By the time babies are 2 to 3 months old, they'll begin watching people as they walk across the room and be able to make eye contact with Mom and Dad. At this point, vision improves enough that babies are ready for new things to stimulate them (while still being attracted to the details of familiar objects that they are only now noticing). Vision improves to 20/60 or better around 6 months of age, allowing your little bundle to distinguish your face from the sea of adult faces he's already encountered.

 "When I'm hungry, one of them feeds me," thinks the baby. An infant may look across the room toward the refrigerator because she's learned that bottles come from there. A breastfed baby may look at Mom the same way, as if to say, "Hey, there's the one with the milk!"

By 4 to 5 months of age, a baby will visually follow an object  -- such as a spoon or a rattle  -- when it falls out of her hand, marking the beginning of her understanding that she is separate from other people and things around her. A baby is beginning to crack into the huge world of encoded communication that flies around  -- what we call language.

 As the baby's babbling becomes more distinct (around 8 to 10 months), parents begin to wonder if she is actually forming words: "mama," "dada," or even complex phrases. But in general, babies this age don't associate words with meanings. By babbling, a baby practices forming the varied sounds of her native language, with parents trying to help by providing lots of verbal input. 

By 8 months, babies begin to retain words in their long-term memory, even though they don't comprehend their meanings. At 12 months of age, most infants have retained enough information to understand 50 words, and by 18 months, they'll probably be able to use those words themselves.

Most parents already know that infants thrive on attention. Our instincts tell us to cuddle, talk, read, and play games with our children. But despite all that we know about our babies' developing brains, each infant is born with a distinct personality and potential. Day by day, he'll offer up more insights about who he is. It's a mystery that is revealed all too quickly, since by the time he's a toddler, few of his thoughts are likely to go unexpressed.

 Baudelaire was right: "Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."

The joys of grandfatherhood

Many are the joys of grandfatherhood.. 

Some of you may remember I wrote of my weeks of depression and how conversations with my grandson kept my spirits aloft even though I only saw him on my computer. But then last week he flew into town with his parents and I could hold him in my arms, it was really different. And when he wrapped his chubby arms around my neck, gave me a kiss and said "dada", it was bliss indeed!

Truth be told, there's nothing better than being a grandparent. It is only now that I realize the real joys of grandparenthood. You have all the pleasures of parenting with none of its obligations. And your grandchildren respond in kind. Our grandchildren accept us for ourselves, without rebuke or effort to change us, as no one in our entire lives has ever done, not our parents, siblings, spouses, friends - and hardly ever our own grown children. Indeed, I came to realize that perfect love does not come until the first grandchild!

And what a bargain grandchildren are!  You give them any loose change, and they give you a million dollars' worth of pleasure for the rest of your life. Most often when they create mischief and mayhme , they can always run to grandpa to escape the wrath of their parents. Of course grandparents are there to also help the child get into mischief they haven't thought of yet.  But there is a down side as you grow old. While an hour with your grandchildren can make you feel young again, anything longer than that, you start aging quickly! 

Just watching him get up each day, discovering new things with joy and wonder is a particular delight. For him everything is new and every day has a miracle hidden inside it. And as he meanders around, he teaches you to look for the beautiful little things in life: how a window remote works, how the little wooden spoon makes a wonderful drum stick, how the raindrops fall from the heavens. While every day is not always beautiful and good, he manages to find something good and fascinating in it.

Looking for that good will also teach us to be grateful for what we have and worry less about what we don’t have. It will help us to find contentment and happiness in the small things. So does his perspective teaches us that life is made up of everyday miracles. Truly grandchildren are God's way of compensating us for growing old. 

And an unexpected joy of grandfatherhood is watching your son become a loving and doting father

A day in the life of Nikhil the great

A day in the life of .. Revisited

A few weeks ago I had written about the books of the future - how they would include photos, videos, etc and that reading would become a much more complete satisfaction than merely words on the page.

Here I try and attempt to rewrite one of my articles to see if the inclusion of photos and videos does indeed make for a more satisfying read.

See what you think?

---------------


Our grandson was visiting us over the past few weeks and every day with him was a wondrous voyage of discovery.

It would begin early in dawn, when this sleepy, tousled eleven month old would toddle into our bedroom and climb on to our bed.

Good mornings said, he would set about exploring his environs. I introduced him to the remote for the window curtains, which entertained him enormously as he watched them go up and down with wondrous eyes. And to music on my IPAD - he became partial to the lilting tunes of the quawaali and would dance to its rythmns. His grandmother plied him with various toys - among them a singing camel from Jordan and an improvised drum. Soon, too soon, he would be plucked away by his parents for the morning ritual of drinking his milk, an exercise he vigorously disapproved of as an interruption to his morning.


Even though he was tied up in his high chair- to make sure he did not make a bolt for it- he had by now perfected various ways of expressing his dislike of the milk. Among his tactics were to close his eyes and pretend it was not there, another to turn his head 180 degrees so he would not see his mother, a third was to shake his head vigorously sideways to express his non approval and finally to pretend to vomit in disgust. When none of this worked, he kept looking at the floor so the milk would not go in from his now full cheeks down. It took three of us to make sure he drank his milk and even then half the time half the milk ended up on his clothes instead of his mouth.

But once the irritating- for him anyway- ritual was over, he would imperiously beckon his father - the mother was the one holding him down- to take him from his prison and reward him with his favorite pastimes. One of that was the living room window from whence he could look down on to cars on the road while manipulating the levers to open it.

Soon he would tire of this limited challenge and demand to be put down on the floor so that he could explore the house on his own. Of course, it was a given that his course would now be a path of destruction to equal Tamerlane with no piece of paper left unshredded.

He often made a beeline for a little wooden toy he had brought with him from Vietnam. It had six different shaped slots with wooden shaped pegs to match. He would spend hours - well not actually hours but a sufficient time for an eleven month old- putting these wooden pegs into the slots. And he was mightily pleased when he could match the wooden peg with the hole. Since all of us were so impressed by his cleverness, he was invariably rewarded by a hearty round of claps. Indeed by the end of his three week stay, he had not only mastered this little toy but also was able to join in the approval claps. Soon we had to go searching for something more challenging.

The car seat was a challenge not to his liking till we agreed to turn it around so that he could see up front. It seems if you are over 10 kilograms, the car seat can be fixed so that he could observe his father driving the car with all the various knobs and gadgets and lights.

In the mall he loved to flirt with all the older girls he met. And of course every storefront was a new world to be discovered and, if allowed, to be ravaged.

Once back home, he would have his dinner quietly, listen to some music and hear his father read his nightly stories about the fire engine that could or the various dogs and cats that populated his life. A big yawn was the signal for the end of the day and he would sleepily call for his mother for his last "snack" of the day and then off to bed.

Another day over and a new one to look forward to. What a wonderful world indeed!