Sure Start Speke

Many people assume that babies are only about diapers, breast milk (or formula) and long naps. Has someone taught you why a baby's body moves the way it does? Has someone taught you why a baby grows up in stages? Most people don't concern themselves with the smaller details of a baby's growth. For others though, the subject of infant and early childhood development is something that they make the time to learn about.

You will never be bored with a baby! At least half the things you thought you knew about babies might not even be true at all! Here are some interesting facts about infant development.

Did you realize that some people give birth to babies who already have teeth? Still other babies are born with no hope of having their teeth come in until they hit their first birthdays.

Your baby, in spite of not being able to talk right away, will amaze you with the range of sounds that he or she can make almost as soon as he or she is born. This is due to the fact that a baby's larynx won't be finished developing until long after the baby has been born. The flexibility of a new voice box is what makes the baby's range better than an adult's range. It doesn't take long for a baby to learn how to assign a sound to an object or idea. This is how a baby's mother can usually figure out what her child wants just by listening to the sounds her baby is making. Did you know that the first words a baby says are almost always simple vowels separated by consonants he can make with the front of his mouth? This is why "dada" is usually said before "mama"-because "mama" is harder for a baby to learn to say, but "dada" usually happens almost by accident!

Most people believe that babies do not know how to smile before they are born. If a baby does smile before a certain point, most people think it is gas. For decades most people believed that babies had to learn how to smile-that it was a condition picked up by the infant early in life. Crying seemed to be instinctual so everyone thought it was simply easier for babies to show when they were displeased and that expressing pleasure was something they had to be taught how to do. These theories have been mostly disproved. Advances have been made in ultrasound technology and more parents are seeing images of their children smiling while they are still in utero. Now families are given ultrasound pictures of their smiling children many weeks before the children's' due date. The belief now is that the birthing process is traumatic for the baby and that it takes a while for the baby to get over it and "learn" to smile again.