Baby's brain is a like a sponge ...

A reader posted this in response to my post about "Colic, baby talk, attachment and all that ..."

Did you see what happened to the family who was kicked off a plane b/c their 3 year old refused to sit down and had a temper tantrum? While I agree that by 3 a child should probably be able to control his/herself a little more (but not much!)...it's the response of the American public that is so disgusting. There are over 200 comments on an MSN blog stating basically the same thing---children should be seen and not heard...some even wrote that children/babies should not be allowed on planes because they cry/fuss sometimes...DISGUSTING!!! I think we should ban the annoying adults who do much worse than try to communicate their feelings the way children/babies on planes do. Okay...enough ranting from me!


I want to reiterate an important point about babies and children from my earlier, loooooong post. Where ever babies they are --- they are vulnerable, open, receptive vessels AND children act out what adults don't deal with. Whatever is happening -- for the adult -- is magnified for the baby, plus the baby will not have the means to communicate it. Well, they do, let me adjust that. Babies don't get heard, acknowledged, respected, and supported when they communicate loudly and desperately. The get shhushed and silenced, sometimes rudely and violently. Babies are non-verbal communicators, except for their crying. Just because they can't talk yet, doesn't mean the brain isn't learning language, and isn't putting thought, experience, and words together. What we say and do gets soaked up. It creates the experiences that wire their brain/computers to function.

Babies EXPERIENCE the world and everything in their environment. They soak it up like a dry sponge. Babies are sensory beings with multiple senses. They SENSE the world, especially in the first months. They hear, see, smell, feel the world around them and that is how they learn. By absorption. They are magnets for what is happening around them and take in everything only to reveal it in amazing ways. What parent doesn't know that on some level? That you can be somewhere, see someone, say something and later the baby obviously remembers it. My daughter met her paternal grandparents at age four months and did not see them again until she was eighteen months old. She saw them in photographs I showed her frequently. Eighteen month old and at O'hare airport at the international gate flooding with people, SHE found their faces in the crowd BEFORE me and reached out for them. Then, I saw them. Later, when she was five she, her twenty-five year old brother, and I re-visited a restaurant where she showed him the table and where every member of the family had sat at this same restaurant over a year before. He looked at me in surprise, and I just said, more like a warning, "Everything you say and do is being recorded at all times." It begins at birth.

The human infant is the purest we'll be in life. We are taught to deny and disassociate from the first moments of life. "Shhhh. Shhh.. you are ok." (Your pain is not real). Most adults can still walk into a room and feel the emotional climate. It's called "energy" and we feel the collective attitude of a room because we are energy beings. (Quantum physics again). Babies are super-charged, one might say. A baby does not yet know how to negotiate the big, loud, bright, toxic world. When you see a small baby in a loud place -- store or football, or family gathering, s/he LOOKS like she is sleeping. Who hasn't heard someone marvel at the baby sleeps through it. Babies aren't sleeping -- they are "checked out", "zoned out", also known as disassociating. Amazing, eh? how early the human learns to disassociate?

So, are the biggest fears of most adults? Public speaking, flying, and death. What do people do -- besides drugs -- to be able to fly? Disassociate. Are they still afraid?!? YES!! What happens to that panicked, frenzied energy? It is absorbed by those less able to avoid, deny, and disassociate. Babies and children. The newborn and infant must be able to shut out stresses in his new environment -- if he not, he is going to be crying about it.

So, why would a young child of three NOT become upset, especially if she has flown before and has THAT experience and memory (of pain in her ears, fear, and parental stress) and she is surrounded by maybe hundreds of stressed out adults, many of whom are also panicked and afraid they're gonna die? Why wouldn't we have the greatest compassion for the smallest among us?

Reminds me of a story, of course. Ten years ago when I lived in Phoenix I flew frequently to Kansas City on Southwest. I got to get on first with my under two daughter and pick a seat. As the plane filled up NO ONE wanted to sit by us. In fact, seats around us were last to fill. It was great. There was always an extra seat and they allowed me to put my car seat on for here with the understanding if they needed the seat they would stow the car seat. Aaah, the good, ole days. I loved Southwest -- it's run by a woman, you know!

What would the world look like if children really and truly were "our greatest resource" as is given "lip service?"