Discrediting Babies’ Experience: From Gas to Grins

For some reason, in Western culture there has been a long tradition of dehumanizing babies. Baby behaviours have been dismissed as random brain reflexes. Baby crying has been written off as lung expansion. And baby emotional expressions have been ignored as mere primitive impulses.

If you can believe it, the medical world didn’t even think that infants could feel pain until the 1980’s. This assumption was so strong in hospitals that it took several major studies to break through an entrenched reluctance to use anesthetics even when performing surgery on infants. This example is part of a wide spectrum of situations in which babies’ experiences have been, and in some cases still are, discredited in ways that harm our understanding of these small human beings. And worse, dismissing the reality of a baby’s ability to have genuine experiences jeopardizes their right to being understood or cared for in a safe, compassionate, and respectful way.

Even though the above is an extreme example, we still see many vestiges of that paradigm in our parenting advice today. For instance, ignoring babies when they are communicating their needs–such as leaving them to ‘cry it out’--is a remnant of antiquated parenting recommendations from an era when a baby’s distress was seen as more of a synaptic tic than an actual expression of experience, communication, needs, or emotion. Even though it hasn’t completely trickled down into popular parenting guidance, neuroscience at least now understands that a baby’s cries are real, and require attentive parenting in response. We now realize that there are long term repercussions to ignoring a crying baby–that healthy emotional regulation begins with response parenting.

A very minor example from our societal tendency to undermine a baby’s emotional experience is the common dismissal that their early smiles are ‘just gas’. We still hear this all the time, even though it has been debunked by multiple studies. And, I would add, by common parental observation.

Very young babies smile in response to pleasant feelings, nice dreams, and enjoyable moments. Their earliest smiles begin in the womb, and are considered more instinctive and fleeting than their later smiles which occur with more intention. It varies significantly, but most babies smile impulsively for the first 4 - 8 weeks–transient, unintentional, adorable smiles that happen awake or asleep, brief and evanescent, gone before you can reach your camera. These signify happy thoughts, delightful feelings, and agreeable sensations. These reflexive smiles are the prelude for social smiles. They may not be intentional, but they are true expressions and are far more significant than ‘just gas’.

Sometime around 4 - 8 weeks (or earlier, or later), babies start smiling socially. These smiles have very different quality. Your baby is now smiling at you, with you, or in response to you. They smile with social intention and clear delight. These are the smiles that used to be considered “real” smiles, because they are so unambiguously joyous and purposeful. 

These social smiles are often perceived as an indication that the baby has entered a new level of interactive engagement with us. The baby is now giving back, participating in what hitherto felt like a one-way effort. These are the smiles that feel rewarding, and give us reassurance that our endless cooing and bouncing and nurturing is actually being received. People say those charming social smiles are validating, and make all those sleepless nights and hours of rocking finally feel worthwhile.

I can completely see why the social smiles feel ‘real’ compared to the earlier reflexive variety, since the baby’s response to their own internal sensations isn’t anchored in their response to ourselves. But for me, the question isn’t how we can prove that these earliest smiles mean anything, but rather why we would have assumed they didn’t? Why was the default ever accepted that babies were just blank slates with no senses, consciousness, or emotions of their own? Why would we think any type of smile is just gas?

As a parent, I believe there is at least some understanding of my babies’ abilities and emotions that I have learned from direct and raw experience, and that I believe most parents recognize. Unfiltered by hierarchical influence, I would have assumed my baby’s early smiles meant exactly what we now know to be true: a response to pleasant moments. And while learning that studies have finally ‘proven’ that those early smiles aren’t just gas is mildly validating, I am more nettled by the need to wait for science to discover something that we can already see in the first place. Millions of mothers noticed that babies could breastfeed in their sleep before a study officially documented it. Millions of mothers knew that responding to their baby’s cries felt better than ignoring them. And millions of parents knew their babies could feel pain long before science announced it. 

It is great when science catches up to pre-existing knowledge, but unfortunate that millions of parents are taught to distrust their own observations and experience because what they know to be true has not yet been verified by a lab. So next time you see your baby smile, if you notice that it fills you with delight, warms your heart, and brings a big grin to your own face in response, you don’t need a research study to tell you that you and your baby are having a very special moment. But if you want to read one anyway, here you go: 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2597649/