10 things I've noticed about my 10-month-old child
She does not care if food is all over her face.
For me, the sensory experience of yogurt on my face sounds unpleasant. But when I think about it, it’s more all the anticipated consequences that are unpleasant. This might get on my clothes, it will make my beard sticky, people will look at me poorly. I wonder if her transition from food-on-face-is-okay to-food-on-face-is-not-okay will be due to social learning, or actual disliking of the sensation.
There are a lot of children’s books out there, most with subtle messages about your family loving you, but Brown Bear Brown Bear, What do you See takes the award for most popular children’s book that goes meta.
She isn’t developed enough to understand it yet, but it makes me wonder how many child’s first ‘I’m looking at me, but from the outside’ experience stems from this book.
She wasn’t ticklish until about a month ago. Now, even if I act like I will tickle her, she laughs in anticipation.
This has me curious about what tickling really is ( I have not looked into the topic very deeply). As a kid, I heard it was impossible to tickle yourself. According to Wikipedia, this is mostly true and brain imaging studies suggest some cortical suppression of the tickle ‘reflex’ when self-tickling. However, strangely some people with schizophrenia have the ability to tickle themselves.
Within the last month, she seems to have created the concept of ‘handle’ in her mind.
Instead of grabbing objects wherever her hand lands, she reaches for parts that are best fit to grab; even if the object is new to her. The concept of a handle seems pretty innate to me and I didn’t notice it until watching my daughter. It’s just instinctual that things have handles (or at least the best ways to grab them). It’s like she has developed a sense of physics (gravity, torque, etc) without actually knowing what those this are at all. The only time I can think that I actively think about this is when moving furniture or other heavy objects. This sounds obvious or nonimportant, but it makes me wonder what other instinctual concepts (like gravity) that I have in my model of the world that are so innate that I don’t even notice them.
She is superficially good at passing Turing Tests; which means she fails them1
She will respond to ‘Who I am?!?’ with ‘Da-da’, but also reply this way if anyone else asks the question. She’s been trained to respond to that series of syllables in a way that gives the impression of understanding, but obviously… she’s just Guessing the Teacher’s Password.
Related to 6), she seems to have sense of self.
I looked for it early on but didn’t see it. It was a gradual transition that I can’t pinpoint down, but she seems to have a strong sense of other v self now. Before, experiences were just happening, but now the self-other dichotomy has kicke dinto gear. it seems to me a Gradual transition. Not sure when it started. Google says self awareness develops around age 15 to 24 months based on the child’s ability to recognize a marking in a mirror as on the self. I’m going to start testing this regularly, but I can imagine a sense of self-other dichotomy developing before passing that test. She passes that imaginary, non standardized, invalidated test in my unbiased opinion.
She is very curious
I already pretty much know how the world works. I don’t need to create mental models of what happens when a rubber duck gets put in a cup and taken out x 100 times like she does. I don’t have a desire to poke my finger into the ethernet port. I can’t imagine having to start from ground zero and develop an understanding of everything, but I guess I did it once and so does she. Related: she loves people watching
She likes to share toys
I don’t know how long this will last. Eventually, a sense of scarcity will develop and ignorance will no longer be bliss. But currently, she is naive and happily hands things to me when asked in a robotic way as similar to 5). (I always hand them back)
When she gets tired, executive control fades.
Of course, tired babies cry. But more specifically, I’ve noticed she can normally stare out the window of a moving car as things fly by with a fixed gaze. However, when she’s tired she will begin repeatedly tracking the trees as they fly by. This results in her eyes shifting left and right really fast for about 10 seconds before drifting off to sleep. I’m imagining her ability to focus is fading and her reflexive instincts to track moving objects is kicking in. But I could be completely off the mark here.
Raising a kid is hard
My wife is very dedicated, thinks critically, and gives significantly more attentive to details than I do. And that was before we had our child.2 With that combination of traits, any part of parenting we do has been more likely overresearched than under. Despite that, our daughter still developed some cradle cap. The dog has still almost trampled her. We almost gave up on breast feeding. Overall, raising a child is HARD. The consequences of how you raise a child are enormous - its literally3 someone's life trajectory on the line. It boggles my mind that anyone can just have one (or five). I don’t think mandating a ‘how to parent’ course is the answer, but I can only imagine how wide the gap is between children’s upbringing - even when putting aside issues of blatant abuse. Our pediatrician encouraged us to not give our 6 month old child juice or soda for as long as we could hold out; that’s a low bar.
To be fair, she mainly fails at language not necessarily ‘being conscious. I think the debate is up in the air for when that ‘officially begins’
Human imaging studies and animal models have shown that the pregnant brain undergoes remodeling and refinement to better handle the new role of mothering an infant. For example, hormonal fluctuations late in pregnancy act on the brain to decrease fear or aversion and increase attraction toward infants. These changes in behavior tend to be lasting. I’ve even read researchers have been able to separate nuliparious MRI brain images from those of new mothers. Perhaps as expected, the brains of fathers were unchanged before and after.
And I mean literally, not the way ‘literally’ is used commonly but actually means figuratively