Parents Who Hid Child’s Gender for Five Years Now Face Backlash
When Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper had their son, Sasha Laxton, five years ago, they decided that rather than make a big splashy “It’s A Boy!” announcement, they’d keep the news to themselves. Instead, they only told a select number of relatives that little Sasha was a he; to everyone else the child was referred to as “the infant” and described without gendered pronouns. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge …
If your dad’s got a motorbike then you win, even if your dad is ginger.
This is pretty much how I remember the logic of comparing and competing about our parents when I was a kid.
I remember my sister telling people her dad was a strong man. I told him this and he said she was right. She meant like in a circus though, with a fancy mustache and tight leopard print pants with the fashioned-in braces.
I’m only thinking about all this because we went with the Animal to visit some of his other kids yesterday and I was reminded of how important it is, at a certain age, to be able to brag about your family and especially your parents.
Let’s not let them down, eh.
Shh… Even sleeping babies can hear you’re unhappy
You know those times when you’ve argued, wept, or otherwise stressed out while your baby was sleeping? Turns out if a baby can hear you, it still knows how you feel.
fMRI scans of sleeping babies aged from 3 to 7 months show activity in the middle temporal gyri, right lingual gyrus and medial frontal gyri when human voice sounds including crying, laughter and other neutral noises were played to them. Basically that’s the same as you’d expect to see in an adult listening to those sounds, awake.
What’s more intersting is that unhappy human voice sounds – crying etc – activate the insular cortex and gyrus rectus more strongly, again just like in fully conscious adults. So babies can hear us and interpret our mood from our voices even when they’re asleep.
Nobody’s really sure why this is. Maybe the babies are processing the sounds and learning as they sleep. Maybe they’ve already learned to recognise those sounds and associate them with maternal stress they experienced in the womb. Maybe they’re just evolved to be alert to any sign of danger while they sleep, and people arguing or crying around them could potentially do something dangerous.
Whatever the reason, I’m glad that science has finally supplied some evidence to back up all the anecdotes and old wives’ tales about not doing your freaking-out in the same room as your sleeping infant.
Source: New Scientist
Image credit: ECohen
Animal Intelligence: Crows learn who to mouth off at
This is awesome. New Scientist says there are crows on the Uni of Washington campus who were subjected to an experiment 5 years ago in which they were temporarily captured & released by someone wearing a particular mask. They learned to recognise the mask and flashmobbed anyone wearing it; they followed the wearer around, cawing at top volume.
Nifty thing is, only 26% of the crows did that 2 weeks after the start of the experiment. After almost 3 years, 66% of the crows exhibit the same behaviour when they see the mask. That includes birds who weren’t even born yet when the trappings happened – they simply learned who to ‘scold’ from their parents.
This struck me as amazing and even cute, but then I had to think: what if instead of following people and cawing at them, the birds had turned to terrorism? If we’re not the only species that can learn a behaviour from others around us, we’d better hope they never learn to copy the ways that humans react when we feel oppressed by sinister external forces.
As people and especially as parents, we need to remember the crows before we display prejudice, anger, hatred and aggression. Let’s not have our children grow up screaming at masks only we’ve taught them to fear, when they don’t even know what’s underneath.
Just a thought. Yours?
If you want to read the whole paper, it’s here.
Image credit: crowdive
Baby TV: Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Baby TV, at first glance, seemed like a great idea. 24 hour broadcasting, no advertising, just developmental programming for the under-3s.
A couple of the shows I watched were OK (with the volume really low, at least – all that singing is hard to take at times). There were some nice short animations that I found quite appealing. And I figured the lack of advertising would make Mini-MI a bit less likely to start demanding happy meals and branded character merchandise.
Then I started picking up on the odd thing here and there that set my teeth right on edge. My most jaw-dropping OMG-they-didn’t moment thus far came from Learn with Baby (2006), in which the twee but slightly breathy voice-over lady enthuses, “There are many different shapes of eyes: slanted… big… and small!”
That’s wrong wrong wrong on so many levels. Except the ones where it’s not even wrong, just bollocks. I mean, for a start, none of those are shapes. Slanted is an orientation, big and small are sizes. All of them are relative measures referring to the rendering or presentation of a shape, hence not to do with the shape itself. It downright pisses me off that they’re leading ickle babies up the geometric garden path.
And did they get Prince Philip to script this? It might as well say, “There are big and small versions of normal eyes, then there are some weird people with slanted ones.” I should sue them for the injuries sustained in dropping my jaw to the fucking floor.
They’re lucky I’m British and accustomed to hearing that shit from our noble prince consort, so I just switched to a different channel.
Image credit: Stannered
Our baby’s backwards…
Mini-MI’s been learning to crawl (sort of) this winter. She’s great at lifting her upper body off the ground, looking around, reaching out to things… then she’d put her head down on the floor and do a breaststroke-swimming leg thing that gave her zero propulsion on account of her legs being mostly in the air.
If laid on her back, she can arch up and crab-walk with just her head and feet on the ground. It’s a bit like that scene that was cut from The Exorcist, but with (usually) less vomit. Placed in her cot for a nap, she rolls onto her side and tips her head back until it’s almost at a right angle to her spine so that she’s looking up at the head of the bed. When I look in on her after she’s fallen asleep, she’s usually on her belly with her face pressed into her favourite book or her bedtime bear. Then when she wakes up she’ll turn around until she’s lying across the width of the cot instead of its length, and flail around gurgling to herself until someone comes to get her.
My baby’s certainly very mobile; she just doesn’t crawl. She pushes herself backwards with her arms, belly sliding across the floor, rather than moving forwards using her legs. She likes to use her padded plastic changing mat as a kind of body board, lying partly on top of it with her legs dangling over the edge.
The Animal reckons she’ll be walking before she really figures out crawling. I won’t be surprised if he’s right. Then again, a quick google tells me that most babies start crawling or other forms of autonomous distance-covering any time between about 6 months and 10 months old, so I won’t be surprised if she’s crawling forwards right now when I walk back into the room.
Child development is a fascinating subject. 50% of that is because it’s so individual and unpredictable; the other 50% is because it’s genuinely laugh-out-loud funny to watch. As I’m writing, sitting now on the sofa in front of Mini-MI, I’ve been watching her lean over in her Bumbo, grab her changing mat and pull it closer next to the chair, then pelvic-thrust herself out of the seat and roll sideways onto the mat. She may not be crawling, but her escapology skills and her sense of self-preservation are coming along just fine.
Related Articles
- Babies on the Edge (scientificamerican.com)
- Perspective on the Bumbo Seat (brighthub.com)
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