Child Intellectual Development

In its first months a human baby seem virtually helpless. Note the use of the words 'seem' and 'virtually'. Babies may not do very much, but without the slightest effort they manage to get us, their parents, to run around doing everything on their behalf. In two decades' time we will be helping break them out of Thai or Vietnamese jails. The servitude never ends.
 

Child Intellectual Development

Vulnerable and weedy be damned. The human baby is an extraordinary creature, with extraordinary abilities. As well as growing, over the next year it will learn how to live. It is already amazingly alert, sensitive to its surroundings, watching, listening, soaking everything up. It is not staring at you because it thinks you are an idiot. It is trying to see what you are doing, who you are. It is acquiring knowledge. Everything is new. Everything is raw material. (All babies are writers. Discuss.) 

Consider the amazing reflexes a baby is born with. The pre-smile is just one of many. Probably the most famous is the grasp reflex. Junior will grasp anything you put into its tiny hand. Play tug of war with your finger - and expect to lose. The more you pull your finger, the tighter it holds on. Already the little bleeder has the upper hand.
 
Some reflexes are easy to misinterpret. Stand your baby on a table and he/she will take an instinctive step forward. Does this mean Junior will walk early, have instinctive ball skills and one day play for England? Sadly not. It's just what they call the step reflex, and like most of these things it disappears after a few weeks. Put your baby stomach down on the table and, with luck, you'll witness the crawl reflex. Take your baby into the sea - on a warm day; ideally - and you will find it can swim, or at least make reflex swimming movements to keep afloat. (An image memorably captured on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind album.) 

If a baby believes it is falling, it may throw out its arms and legs in a star formation (this is called the Moro response). Most practical of all may be the rooting reflex. Stroke baby's cheek and it will automatically turn its head in that direction, looking for a nipple to suck. Fascinating to watch, although baby will start to get pissed off unless supplied with a real milk engorged breast from time to time.

The abilities of the newborn continue to surprise the men in white coats who get research grants to look into this sort of thing. The Medical Research Council's Cognitive Development Unit have shown that babies recognise their mother's faces from four days old. Again, they have no idea how this happens. A 1983 study found that some newborns could imitate an adult opening their mouth and sticking out their tongue - and they could do this when only half an hour old. (Imagine: you have just given birth, and some men in white coats rush in, pull faces at your baby, write down the results and rush out again. All in the name of knowledge.) This skill, if that's what it is, lapses after three weeks or so. Six months later the baby's ability to imitate returns as though it had never been away.

In The Father's Book, David Cohen gives a list of things to try with your baby in its first 24 hours of life. It's worth reproducing in full:

1. Make eye contact.
2. Look at your child and smile.
3. Tickle his or her toes. 
4. Test the grasp reflex. 
5. Stroke the baby gently. 
6. Make ridiculous noises at the baby. 
7. Watch for the baby imitating you. 

If you don't find 'bonding' with your baby the most natural thing in the world - and many men don't - then treating it as art object of study may be more helpful than you know. But this sort of stimulation is what a baby is waiting for. Newborns process information as quickly as two-year-olds. Their brains are ready for everything life can throw at them, including strange men sticking tongues out at them.
 
Incidentally, not all of the baby's reflexes wear off after a few weeks. The survivors include the sneeze reflex (when nasal passages are irritated) and the yawn reflex (when additional oxygen is needed, or there's a boring documentary on TV). These and others will stay with baby for the rest of its life.

But as you begin to understand how much this immobile little lump can do, and its potential, you also begin to appreciate how fine a little baby's spirit is. They may cry a lot, but so would you if you had no other way of getting your needs met. The idea that babies are in some way malign or cunning - as previous generations often believed implicitly - is wrong, and has been wholly discredited. A baby needs you to look after it.
 

Evolution has given it instincts and some reflexes and beautiful blue eyes to help it do this. The rest is up to you. It's not the baby who is the writer, it's the parent. The baby is the blank sheet of paper, and you are holding the pen. To find out more, you can check out Child Intellectual Development.

 

Child Development Tips

DUNCAN: I remember when we first brought J home, we had to give her a bath. We laid her down on the mat. Dinah and l were running in and out of the room, getting towels and stuff, and she just lying there going 'Waaaah!' And we're saying to her, 'Look, we don't know what we're doing, either! This is new for us, too! Don't expect too much!'
 

Child Development Tips

IVAN: I continually felt I might not be up to the task. I still do, and I don't think that's anything unusual. You just do your best. And I think anybody who says they know how to bring up children is lying, or a fool. I still worry late at night, about my son, about my daughters, what I've said to them, what I've done, or whatever. It never goes away. 

ANTHONY: Up to the task, no, never felt that at all. It was hard after R was born, because Astrid was so ill and knackered and down and we were a bit on our own. None of our family live locally and the parents are quite old. My mum's blind and got arthritis.

Astrid's younger sister was quite cool, but my sister just disappeared off the map. So it was hard physically. I gave up work and did a lot of child care (R was on bottles from the first night) and didn't go anywhere. Oh, and it was Christmas and Astrid's sister and new husband stayed with us in Astrid's tiny flat. Urn, busy.

And it's never really eased off. You always want to do great, exciting, loving, supportive things, but somehow the mashing-up first. I don't think I'm a bad dad at all, but it's such a slog.

The baby stares at you as though you are an idiot. And maybe you are. But the baby doesn't know that. All the baby is doing is growing. Everything is subsumed to this task. When your partner was pregnant, the baby's health and well-being always came first. That wasn't a conscious decision: the biology took care of it. Now baby is out in the world, you the father have joined the equation.
 
Baby's needs still come first, but it's both you and your partner who will now be squeezed dry. At birth a typical baby weighs 7.5lb. It will lose a couple of pounds in the first few days of life, as it adjusts to the sudden loss of its beloved placenta. A week later it will be back to birth weight and from then there is no looking back. Glug, glug, glug, glug. After five months Junior will have doubled its body weight, and will add the same again by its first birthday. Not even professional darts players can do this. At birth Junior is, on average, 20 inches tall (or long). A year later he or she will have added ten to twelve inches. His or her brain will have more than doubled its weight. The heart will be nearly twice the size. She could well be talking. He could well be walking.
 
Compared to most animals the human baby seems a vulnerable, rather weedy thing. A baby cow pops out, stands up, around a bit and that's it. End of childhood. Whereas our young are 18 or 19 before they finally leave home, go on terrible gap year holidays to the Far East and end up as drugs 'mules' for lipsmacking oriental villains. Human childhood lasts forever, primarily because of these large brains we have been saddled with. 

Chimps and apes reach sexual maturity far more quickly, and so did our distant hairy ancestors. But the great.evolutionary tool that is our brain has developed beyond these modest origins, and now it needs all those years to acquire the knowledge to lead an independent life. (Until we move back home at 25, that is.) To find out more, you can check out Child Development Tips.
 
 

Advice For New Parents

It's Alive 

It's lying in its crib, staring up at you. Staring hard. Not blinking. And thinking, 'You're a bit of an arse, aren't you?'

No it's not. That's just your imagination. Your brand new baby is capable of few thoughts more coherent than 'I'm hungry', 'I'm tired', 'I'm uncomfortable' and 'I'm bored'. Or the one he/she is thinking now, which is almost certainly 'I recognize you. You're that bloke.' 
 

Advice For New Parents

But the stare of a newborn baby cuts through its parents' defenses like a razor through ricepaper. It seems to be able to see deep into your innermost soul, and it doesn't like what it sees there.
 
Put it down to tiredness or shock. Few new mothers seem to have this sort of reaction, but several new fathers have told me about it, later when drunk. They talk of the baby's devilish halfsmile, of its unflinching gaze, of its seeming to know. 'Know what?" I Say, fascinated. But the new father doesn't reply. He doesn't want me to know as well. He just stares into his drink and contemplates his fate.
 
What he probably doesn't know is that the devilish halfsmile is a reflex, one of several you will be able to spot if you look close enough. The reflex smile (or 'pre-smile') has been seen in babies as young as three days old. It's a fleeting thing - gone before you have seen it, usually - and it disappears completely after a month, but it can seriously fuel fatherly paranoia, especially if you are finding the bonding process difficult. Drunks and the deranged shout 'Who are you looking at?' to anyone they pass - this is the new parents equivalent. The reflex smile, I should add, is entirely meaningless.
 
The first few days of a baby's new life are a whirlwind of novelty and activity. People will be 'dropping in' at wildly inappropriate times to 'pay their respects' (see how rough the mother is looking, confirm the baby is yours, eat all your biscuits, proudly present you with battery-operated fluffy pink hippopotamuses that sing annoying songs when prodded or thrown against hard surface). 

This is strange and annoying and to be cherished, because you will rarely have this attention again as parents. Should you elect to breed again, don't expect anyone to turn up and see the second baby, let alone hand over expensive presents. You will do well to get the odd email. But a first baby always draws the crowds. One way to handle it is to arrange visits at a particular time each day, say between five and seven p.m. Then you can chuck them out before they drinking all your wine and asking what time's dinner. (It also forestalls maternal exhaustion. Several new mothers I know said it felt like being in a zoo.) Do stock up on biscuits, though. No one will bring them. And you and your partner will also need a secret stash for yourself, for the hard times.
 
For there will be hard times. A newborn baby is more than a full-time job. It's about one and a half full-time jobs, with lots of unscheduled overtime. You will have to learn a great deal very quickly. Antenatal classes will have attempted to cover these early days with baby, but by that point in the course your brain was so full of contractions and epidurals there was no room for anything else. 

It was hard enough at that stage to imagine what the birth would be like; it was impossible to imagine what life would be like afterwards. So suddenly you are at home with your small baby, which cries half the time, wakes up at all hours of the day and the night and fills thousands of nappies in any 24-hour period. You learn fast because there's no choice. Some people say that newborn babies are anarchists. They are not. They are more like excessively demanding feudal warlords. 

Before the birth you probably lived your life with a fair degree of freedom. Within certain bounds you did much as you wanted to. Now you are an indentured servant, utterly at the mercy of a pint-sized tyrant who invariably issues orders with a furious cry. (The crying may not be that loud as yet. But as baby grows, so will its decibel output. In six months' time it will be like living with Concords.) 

And you may feel that you are not up to the task. If it's any consolation, this is the way everyone feels. To find out more, you can check out Advice For New Parents.

Why Dads Don't Buy Baby Clothes

Your baby, whatever its size, shape and vomiting preferences, will go through outrageous quantities of clothes. The stuff you have bought for its birth won't fit in a few weeks. In the first year you can look forward to a complete turnover of wardrobe three or four times. Babies grow in the first year as they will never grow again. They are dedicated growing machines. To buy new clothes for each new stage ... well, just the thought of it brings me out in a sweat. And lots of people do it.

Why Dads Don't Buy Baby Clothes

They may have loads of money, or they have weighed up the options and decided it is worth renting out their orifices in order to pay for it. But it is a choice; it is not strictly necessary. When our daughter was born my friend Esther gave us a black bin liner full of baby clothes. 'What do we need with 38 vests?' said my girlfriend, with a broad grin, as she piled them up neatly. But not all of them were for newborns, and we used every one in the end. And then we passed them on to someone else.
 
The beauty of this is that most children's clothes are often of very good quality; they have to be, in order to persuade mad parents to pay that amount of money for them. It is quite possible to leave a baby clothes emporium with a handful of small bags that between them have cost £75, £100, name your price.

Obviously, it's lovely to have a few new clothes - but that is where presents come in. With luck your indulgent relatives will buy several minuscule outfits for Junior. With more luck they will buy outfits to fit him/her in six or nine months' time, when you are really feeling the pinch. And with most luck they will buy practical clothes - vests, babygros, cardigans, blankets, hats, coats, woolly booties. As opposed to expensive but essentially useless items - party dresses, crop tops, trainers, cufflinks, three piece suits, anything that needs handwashing or anything with lots of buttons.

A quick note on poppers. You may have noticed over the years that most children's clothes are covered with poppers, and you may have assumed that these would be both fiddly and annoying. Absolutely not. Poppers are a glorious and magnificent invention, utterly unconnected to the political philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94), which I always thought was a shame.
 
Most vests and babygros (a.k.a. 'romper suits') have poppers so positioned that you have almost instant access to the nappy area, allowing you to remove a humdinger of a turd before your eyes begin to water and your nasal passages inflame. If there were buttons where poppers should be, you'd be swearing and shouting, the baby would be crying, and before long Social Services would be at the door taking your child away forever. Italian clothes, for some reason, often come with buttons rather than poppers, which explains a great deal.
 
Oh, and zips are good too. We like zips. (Except when they catch.)

If indulgent friends and relatives don't buy you clothes for the baby, they will probably give you a soft toy. Before you became a dad, when you went into the houses of people with small children, you probably noticed that they all had 300,000 soft toys. And you thought, what spoilt little bastards, and what pitifully indulgent parents. And again you were wrong. More likely than not, every one of those soft toys was a present from someone. Parents rarely buy them. They don't need to. It's the default present for small children when your imagination fails you, much as candles are for grown-ups.

Mothwallets know all of these things, and they usually keep quiet about them, for fear of being revealed as mothwallets. Here are the Fundamental Laws of Mothwallet, and clever parents should memorize them all.

First Law: Try and get as much as you can free. Some parents will be gagging to give away their old stuff. Cultivate them. If necessary, throw yourselves on their mercy.

 
Second Law: If buying second-hand, the rules are the same as for cars: you are almost certain to be ripped off. For all you know, that bargain pushchair may have been welded together from two unconnected halves of pushchair. And don't bother kicking the wheels. They saw you coming, my son.
 
Third Law: Never buy soft toys. Especially pink ones. To find out more, you can check out Why Dads Don't Buy Baby Clothes.

Most Expensive Baby Strollers In The World

You will notice a theme creeping in here. All parents need stuff, but who wants to buy it? There are people who must have everything new, every muslin, every last vest, and that's fine, because it means they are buying the stuff the rest of us will later 'borrow' from them. Most parents want to get rid of stuff they no longer need, to make room for stuff they are about to need. You may not know it, but out there are thousands of micro-networks of like-minded parents, all saving each other money by handing things on they no longer want. The system works because much of this stuff easily outlasts any one baby's need for it. For instance:
 

Most Expensive Baby Strollers In The World

1. A baby bath. You can't scrub Junior in your proper bath, or your backbone would drop out. (It's also too big and scary for many little ones.) Showers are good for novelty bath games but little else. So it's nice to have a dedicated baby bath. For newborns a washing-up bowl will do, but Junior will outgrow that in a fortnight or so. In the meantime, go on the scrounge.

Baby baths take up nearly as much room as a pram. I have known parents who have wept with relief when someone offered to take their baby bath away.

2. Bottles and sterilising equipment. Definitely try and scrounge this. Your baby may breastfeed for ever and go nowhere near a bottle, and you could have all that expensive equipment sitting on a shelf for several years. Or until another canny new parent offers to take it off your hands. This feels good, doesn't it?

Every day I look in the mirror each morning and tell myself, "I am a mothwallet. I am a mothwallet and I don't care who knows it,'

Some things you will have to buy. A good sturdy pushchair should give you years of uncomplaining service. Someone else's cranky, rattly old vehicle may collapse the first time you take it more than five minutes' walk away from your home. (As you stand there wondering what to do, baby will poo itself, rain will start pouring and spaceships full of lizard-like aliens will land and enslave all humanity.) But there is also a thriving second hand market out there. Even if you can't get everything for nothing, you should be able to snap things up for far less than shop price. It warms my ventricles just to think about it.
 
Even so, some readers of this blog might be unconvinced. Some readers might come to the conclusion that this is all a bit stingy. That at this vivid and unrepeatable time we should be embracing life, not haggling over it. Consider this story from the Daily Star in January 2004:
 
Russell Crowe turned into the Dadiator after splashing out £50,000 on a cot for his son. The Gladiator star spent over £150,000 on stuff for his boy Charles's nursery. Russell has told friends: 'I want nothing but the best for my boy - whatever the cost. He's going to have the best and coolest nursery in Australia.'
 

The cot is a 19th-century Scandinavian design with ornate carvings. Also on his shopping list were some bedside lamps, and a painting called 'Reflection Of A Boy' - worth £75200 far the nursery wall. A source said: 'Russell chose all the items himself. It's clear he has got a really good eye.' To find out more, you can check out Most Expensive Baby Strollers In The World.