Is newborn smiling just a reflex? Research is challenging the textbooks (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Is newborn smiling just a reflex? Research is challenging the textbooks (2018)

theconversation.com

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> It was even believed that newborn babies couldn’t feel pain in the same way as adults – meaning they were sometimes subjected to painful surgical procedures without analgesia. It wasn’t until the 1980s that medical professionals realised that the stress of the pain actually led to life-threatening shock and complications.

This is just one part of many worrying parts of modern medicine from a few decades ago.

If it wasn't for HIV, many surgeons would still be using their bare hands, sometimes cutting themselves but passing on infections, instead of using hypoallergenic latex gloves. Ironic that the likes of Freddie Mercury and other non heterosexual people have helped society become a little safer.

In time, I expect to see COVID will have reduced the antibiotic resistance seen so commonly in hospitals, because of the routine deep cleaning regimes now employed and routine wearing of facemasks by all inside a hospital.

We might also see the delays in cancer treatments highlighting the one's that work and the one's that dont work.

Considering the stigma that existed a few decades ago and still remains in many parts of the world, regarding unplanned pregnancies or unmarried pregnancies, I wonder if the stress the mother experiences through gestation impacts the mental and physical health of the baby.

In time I think these societal and religious pressures will be seen as negatives if the mother is outside of those conformist pressures, which will further weaken the conformist grip on society.

>This is just one part of many worrying parts of modern medicine from a few decades ago.

You could say exactly the same thing about any point in the past so what makes you think now is any different ?

There is more science available, big data, ability to manufacture practically anything for not a lot of money, I love the fact I can hop online and read studies from a journal that published last week. Couldn't do that in the 90's.

Increasingly seeing a reversal or abandonment of medical theories as new studies offer new insights and present new theories.

So the trend up to WW1 was to use chemicals found in us to treat us, between WW1 and WW2, patented medicine started to appear and this is how big pharma developed. Problem is, in some cases, patented medicine is too alien to the human body, its not evolved enough and so it presents new challenges or problems, depending on your POV.

I'm not saying its perfect today, but the explosion in knowledge over the last 30years has been close to exponential, roughly inline with the silicon chip.

<< In time I think these societal and religious pressures will be seen as negatives if the mother is outside of those conformist pressures, which will further weaken the conformist grip on society.

I don't see that happening. For example, circumcision has been normalized ( in US at least ) so there is not even a need for a real pressure. And this is just one of the more interesting examples of religious dogma pervading life of non-religious individuals.

It does correlate with lower incidence of STI later in life.

Sure. Using the same logic we can say that FGM[1] reduces chances of cancer in the removed parts. It is genuinely odd argument to make that you get less chance of a disease in an organ when you remove an organ or part thereof.

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-47131052

I know two people that had to get circumcised when they were older because of issues of the foreskin restricting urinating. Both cursed their parents for not having circumcised them when they were babies.

I am responding in good faith. It is possible that there is a genetic component, but isn't prevalence of paraphimosis about 1%[1] for males over 16. Some would say circumcision for such a small gain is not the best trade-off.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459233/

I don't necessarily disagree with you. I just know the misery these two older friends of mine went through...just to give another perspective. It makes sense though that there could be a genetic disposition.

I’m trying to imagine modern medicine converging on circumcision as a best practice, in the absence of its ritual origins, and in the absence of cosmetic concerns. But I’m still convinced it’s a retcon.

Which aspect is a retcon? I am not sure if you're taking the pro or con position

I dont see medicine converging at that. Instead, in west, it is being seen as American medical oddity no one cares about.

FGM is mainly an anti-sex thing, before modern contraceptives, this conformist behaviour was used to keep population levels down by making sex painful, but now we have chemicals that can do it, so its not really required now.

I recognise aspects of religious practices was a way to keep followers healthy in the absence of what we would call modern medicine and some of the practices are environmentally driven to some degree. Circumcision is one, dusty desert like locations had limited water, making it harder to wash regularly but in hot desert like area's one's libido will increase, so its the result of trying to reduce the spread of disease. The irony is that the Langerhan cells are removed which plays a part in the immune system response, but it might be considered an attack vector for at least the HIV virus to enter the body according to other reports. What these reports show is even the medical profession are split on whose theory is correct.

I've always been informed the main reason in the past has been because blokes are lazy and didnt wash enough and some religions were so anti-sex it was a way of reducing other problems with the foreskin that can arise.

> In time, I expect to see COVID will have reduced the antibiotic resistance seen so commonly in hospitals, because of the routine deep cleaning regimes now employed and routine wearing of facemasks by all inside a hospital.

I’m a bit confused. For the first part, do you mean “increased antibiotic resistance” (not decreased) with the increased deep cleaning, which cannot really be perfect in an environment that has so many illnesses around? Or are tou saying that the deep cleaning is so good that all germs are killed and thus there are no chances of mutations surviving and spreading?

Antibiotics need to kill bacteria but leave human cells alive. Deep cleaning can kill everything. It's a lot easier for bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics than it is to deep cleaning.

I read somewhere that bacteria evolving to resist deep cleaning would be akin to us evolving to resist bullets.

Try surviving UV-C then, nastier than bullets!

> I wonder if the stress the mother experiences through gestation impacts the mental and physical health of the baby.

There’s pretty good evidence for this already. E.g. https://www.child-encyclopedia.com/stress-and-pregnancy-pren...

> I expect to see COVID will have reduced the antibiotic resistance seen so commonly in hospitals, because of the routine deep cleaning regimes now employed and routine wearing of facemasks by all inside a hospital.

Hospitals were deep cleaning even before covid? It is not like we would discovered contagious diseases with covid.

Babies do all kinds of weird things. One of my daughters said “uh oh!” right out of the womb. She still says it 2 years later the exact same way lol

This is the most fascinating comment in HN history

Are you open to answering a battery of questions about this child and are you aware of how to respond to children when they say they see/hear things you don't or say they remember things you know they've never experienced, in such a way as to not teach them to shut down whatever they're experiencing?

I watched my sons daughter 11 hours a day from 1 month old until they moved away when she was 14 months. My wife was still working and I was retired so I had no problem with it. We went to see them for a week each june. After about 4 years of this we went there and from the back seat she said a particular word over and over. I asked him why she was saying this and he said he didn't know but she just started doing it. I had just changed my wifi password to that word. I know it's not really on the topic but I just wanted to relate a very strange coincidence.

Thanks for sharing this! I'm of the mindset that it's safer to assume humans can experience a form of quantum entanglement between them, especially genetically related people than it is to deny the possibility.

A doctor once told me that babies can't see clearly at distance. Well, a few hours after my daughter was born I entered the room where she was sitting on my wife, and she followed me with her eyes, like a much older child, I walked from one side to the other maybe 3+ meters away, and I couldn't stop looking at her watching me, it was unbelievable. Then she did the same to a nurse that entered the room later, paying attention to everything the nurse did around the room. In comparison my second child was the usual sleepy baby that didn't pay any attention to people.

The distinction seems incoherent. In what way are the genuine emotional smiles of an adult not also "just a reflex"?

Our baby was caught "smiling" in the high resolution ultrasound a few months before birth. We thought it was a very cute image of her face looking directly out at the ultrasound but we did think it was just a fluke, she couldn't actually be smiling.

We have a photo a few weeks after birth where she is curled up on my chest in exactly the same position and she is smiling, and it is exactly the same facial contour as we saw in the ultrasound. That's just her face.

Developmentally, babies aren’t that much different between a few months before birth and a couple of weeks after. Our third one always had his hand on his face in the ultrasounds. He was born with his hand on his face—the pressure left a big handprint on his face for a day or so. And he still liked to be in that position at a few months.

> Up to the second half of the 20th century, the behaviour of newborns was considered mostly reflexive.

This is missing a serious caveat regarding a start date. It might be correct to say since Darwin, or perhaps since Locke, but before that infants were often thought to be far more intellectually capable than most people assume today. Martin Luther, to pick one example, believed infants could have faith in Christ.

My first born never smiled until the 2nd month I think. I was worried he was blind. My second one knows how to smile from day 1.

This is something that interested me when our little one was born. Both my wife and I would swear that he would smile at actual stimuli, more than just a reflex action.

> that he would smile at actual stimuli, more than just a reflex action.

That's what a reflex is though: something done involuntarily in response to a stimuli.

Which really is the same as what smiling is in adults as well, unless you're faking it. Though adults are likely more capable of suppressing the response.

I feel I can't speak to the "social" smile, since in my culture it's really not as common. It's more language than emotion. If you're just smiling randomly here, people will assume you actually are happy and may ask you what you're so happy about - or take it personally. At most a social smile is used as a quick, wordless acknowledgement of someone. Almost a dismissal.

To me the social smile is just a lie, and the other kind of smile is what matters in the end.

Glycine can put a big grin on your face. Kids have higher levels of glycine than adults, thats why they smell nicer than old people.

Every idea of "Babies can't _________" is automatically suspect for me. I grew up in a culture of denial and this language fits the pattern. We've been nurturing a child for 3 years from the assumption that they're capable of all the things people say they can't do. And wouldn't you know it, they're showing us time and again they very well can.

Babies can give consent and often do. People struggling with diaper changes? Probably not looking for consent from the baby or letting them know what's happening. This child has learned we care about what they want.

Baby fights taking a bath? This one did 5 times. After that, mom got in the tub and we sat on the edge watching her. We were all in the tub within 5 minutes. Baths are now totally voluntary.

Babies can't feel pain? Nonsense, of course. We took the advice of a native medicine woman and taught them to feel the pain and stay with it. This was important for the next point.

Too young to learn from natural consequences? Bullshit. We let them stay in a diaper until they let us change it. It only took a few painful diaper rashes between age 1 and 2 before they learned what happens. It was really something to experience them crying from pain and when we asked if they wanted us to do anything, they cried saying "No, just let me feel it!" So they cried on my shoulder a couple minutes, said the pain faded, and then asked to get in the tub.

Children need to be bundled in the cold? Definitely not! That keeps the body from learning how to regulate temperature. We let them go outside wearing whatever and monitor them for shivering. We learned that in colder parts of the world people watch children for the second shiver. The theory is the first one is the body relaxing into the cold and the second is the body starting to tense up to create more warmth because the relaxed state has reached its present limit. We were just out in a park for an hour before sunset in 50 degree weather. They didn't start shivering until a few minutes after sunset and the second shiver didn't come for another 10 mins. It was then that they said yes to an offer of clothes.

We live in a largely adultist world where science has developed with numerous blindspots for people in minority classes, including children.

It makes more sense to abandon conventional wisdom around children these days because much of what humans learned over millenia about humanitng has been lost through the obliteration of the cultures carrying that wisdom.

The approach I take is to learn about feelings and needs, observe deeply, experiment gently, learn from cultures facing extreme versions of whatever is being experienced, learn from indigenous people, and trust (but verify) children are infinitely capable. This allows for maximal growth and a natural discovery of limits, rather than someone else unnaturally limiting learning experiences.

And normalize repair and flexibility, not fear of pain /injury or rules. Anarchism is closer to nature than all other forms of government, so it makes sense to implement anarchism in the home.

I agree to a point - the past is a good source of inspiration in how to raise a child, since it's been so long and we're all the results. But what's your take on slapping a tantrum-throwing child ? Something I think was very popular before and is still in the nativist cultures you describe (and I fondly remember my father solving the problem that way and me learning the limits and feeling I deserved it eventually) that is now hard to do without feeling you cheated or did something wrong.

I know I did twice in my daughter's short life, to show the limits (like she was hitting me violently for some random tantrum and would not stop whatever patient approach we tried so I showed her that was totally out of bound by giving her a nice slap - something my dad swore by) and she started telling people around about it and instead of support for the parent and "you probably deserved it" for the child like I had as a child, people panicked as if I was a child molester so I won't do it again (and actually found distraction strategies that we both find hilarious now and disarm any tantrum so... probably was wrong not to try harder indeed)

It really depends on the culture. Discernment is still really necessary. I've read a few things that suggest the Inuit have the most gentle approach to children.

With respect to showing them limits, what you're describing aren't natural limits. It sounds like you didn't reach a limit beyond your control, but made a calculated decision. That's not a natural limit; that's an arbitrarily chosen one.

Gentle parenting suggests offering cuddles, hugs, gentle restraint (I haven't looked into what this means), and other forms of emotional connection. It's not about patient permissiveness, but connecting with the emotional state of the child and holding space for them to feel their feelings.

Also, something I often see and hear is people getting distracted by the behavior instead of connecting with the needs being expressed. Usually, there was something that preceded the behavior. We had grandparents over and unbeknownst to me, grandma (who loves making mean jokes) threw a diaper at the child. The next day, they threw something at her. Everyone focused on the act of throwing it instead of what came before the throwing. Kids do what they learn from others. If they're taught to emotionally/verbally hit, they'll learn that hurting by physically hitting others is a way to accomplish whatever the verbal/emotional hits are doing as soon as they learn hitting hurts, too. They're not stupid and this is not a hard logical leap anyway. Also, anything that gets more focused attention than the norm will be repeated. That's why giving deep quality attention and connection is the easiest way to prevent unwanted behaviors.

There's no need to act out if not acting out gets the job done. Otherwise, act out.

There's a lot more to this and I'm still learning myself. Things to search for along these lines are gentle parenting and mindful parenting.

On a related note, did you read about the dev who crashed thousands of apps and sites today? That person clearly has needs going unmet. I wonder if anyone's reached out to them and asked what they need yet. Think I'll do that next.

Yeah sometimes I feel people and books consider that children are perfect and THEN corrupted by learning bad habits from adults. But I was very surprised to instead discover that children are selfish, lazy, cowards, dishonest, and generally never do what's right for themselves by default.

I think children are stupid, not in a bad way, but in a "potential to realise" way: they are really not yet adapted to compromise, emotional connection, delayed gratification etc and a LOT of education seems to be to yank it out of them by coercion, rather than patient discussion. Even if it's just going to the corner of the room after you broke a toy out of anger: sometimes, you must humiliate to persist the negative result of a negative action.

Do Inuit benefit from the very harsh environment to make children so dependent on listening to their parents they rebel less you think ? When the choice is do as I say or stand in the ice, maybe ... that's environmental coercion :D

I don't think you've learned how to abandon judgment in order to be able to perceive human behavior clearly enough to recognize what's going on. Children aren't naturally cowards...they're naturally curious to the point that they can die from it. They're not selfish...they're simply not ready to care for other people yet as they're still learning how to meet their own needs. They're not lazy...they've been taught emotional avoidance and have different priorities than adults trying to push adult priorities onto kids. Based on how the world's working right now, that's fucking brilliant, not stupid. I say let the adults suck it. Go cry in a corner. They're not dishonest...they're trying to get their needs met through whatever means necessary. If I sat here and told you all these truths and you still didn't believe me about kids, know what I'd do next? Lie to you, if that's what it takes to meet the needs of the situation and people involved. I'd tell the biggest lie if it would end oppression. As for never doing what's right for themselves, the stuff I wrote in my previous comment is about someone who's been doing most of that stuff since before they were 2. They're able to identify plants. They know which ones not to eat and the only times they try to are to tease us.

Nobody's born perfect. There is, however, definitely programming going on that's impacting every person starting from when they're in the womb and before. And for sure there's a shitload of it when they come out. This is an incredibly important point: we are all programming each other when we interact in various ways and society largely ignores this fact. There's no fucking way a 1-year old is reacting to something without there being some kind of conditioning at play. That's simply not possible.

Children learn to communicate their needs going unmet first by crying. That's what babies are doing when they cry. Then, they learn to ask physically. Then verbally. I don't remember why I wrote this, but I'm keeping it because it's worth knowing.

And anger is almost always a sign of deeper unmet emotional needs. Piling humiliation on top of it doesn't address the sadness, fear, frustration, or whatever that's built up into the anger.

You speak of rebellion. Sounds like you want obedience. I'm not saying you do...just saying it sounds like it. Every being has a need for autonomy. It's a defining aspect of most life. If you want obedience, you're already seeking to deny that need. Rebellion is the emotionally immature reaction, when obedience isn't working for someone. The emotionally mature response is to bring in compassion for all parties and help the ones seeking to deny others' needs come to realize what's going on inside of them that's leading them to ignore the needs of others.

Another thing about kids is they're WAY more easily programmed than adults are. And we have around the world many cultures that do not teach compromise, emotional connection, delayed gratification, mindfulness, or even wtf humans need to survive and thrive. And we have many education systems that don't even bother to address those issues. So why would I ever expect a young person to develop those skills without being born to or nurtured by extraordinary people/circumstances?

As for the Inuit, from what I've read about cultures in harsh environments is that the need for gentleness becomes pretty fucking apparent pretty quick. The Inuit aren't simply gentle, though...they're emotionally connecting with their kids and respecting autonomy, so they're probably not experiencing much rebellion. I did a brief google search here to find some clarity and what I found was this, which suggests teenage rebellion isn't a human universal. This tracks with what I've read before. https://churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-blogs/149004-the-my...

I want to invite children to rebel against the school system, learn about compassion, and form roaming gangs in neighborhoods seeking to liberate more children and help more parents connect with their kids. Because the adult world as it stands is clearly out of alignment with nature and how the adults are handling it is clearly out of alignment with the needs of young people.

As I always say, they’re just a bundle of cells.

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