Babies can reveal much about how we are wired
How early in life do underlying personalities reveal themselves? How innate are gender roles? And what effect does technology have on young children’s development? These questions, and many others, can be explored scientifically, more comprehensively than ever, by studying the behaviour of babies. At the start of our lives we are a clean slate. By looking at how babies learn, we can understand how our brains work at any age. Because babies have not yet been set in their ways or conditioned, we can look at what happens the very first time they’re exposed to something – and it can tell us an awful lot.
I’ve been a paediatrician for eight years, with a background in psychology, and in a new three-part BBC documentary series, Babies: Their Wonderful World, I set out to look for answers. The programme centres around an ambitious scientific study of 200 babies in Britain, the results of which were illuminating. Here is some of what we discovered.
Is there something innate about gender roles?
Back in the late Nineties, an experiment was conducted on children under two to see what assumptions they made about gender roles before they could be consciously aware of the concept.
The results showed even young infants associated domestic work and childcare with women, and mechanical activity with men.
Almost three decades have passed. Gender roles have been subject to particular scrutiny, and the notion our sex defines what we’re good at has been roundly rejected. So how innate are our perceptions of gender roles? Are we naturally inclined to assume men and women can’t, or shouldn’t, do the same things? Our study suggested the opposite.
We asked the babies to identify whether a “mommy” or “daddy” doll would perform particular tasks. They noticeably did not share the assumptions of the nineties babies. We did not see a pattern of them matching each doll with roles traditionally associated with its sex. What this points to is that these roles are socially created. That the world is not fixed, nor are gender roles static. This should encourage us to question how much is really inbuilt and innate in us – and what, on the other hand, is not.
How hard-wired are our personalities?
Are you born with your personality already pre-written, or does it form as you progress through life, influenced by your environment and experiences? It’s the age-old nature versus nurture debate – and the answer, in this case, is: both. Our research reveals certain traits do appear far earlier in life than we expected, and this is likely to have a genetic basis.
What we saw was that children of six to seven months already had a sense of how they were going to respond to the world. Faced with different stimuli – a scary mask, or an interesting but unfamiliar object – the babies consistently responded according to their “type” - with excitement, with calm or with caution. These are the three basic personality types we see in adults, too, and it’s fascinating to see how early they’re apparent among babies. However, it doesn’t mean they won’t change over time, but what we picked up was that babies, even as young as six months, exhibit the traits likely to accompany them through life. So, it seems, a risk-taking baby is likely to grow up to be a risk-taking adult.
This has implications for parents: if you understand your child’s personality, you are better equipped to help them interact with the world .
How bad for children is technology?
It’s been posited gross motor skills can suffer when an infant spends large amounts of time using screens.
To test this we asked babies who use tech such as tablets or smartphones to walk along a straight line, observing how they managed this compared to those who don’t use any tech. There was, no significant difference.
When we asked them to put pen to paper, the fine motor skills of the tech-using infants – their visual and hand-eye coordination – were appreciably superior to their tech-free peers. This doesn’t mean we should all hand our babies a tablet; humans have developed fine motor skills quite happily without technology for millennia. And tech is certainly no substitute for the care and attention babies need from their parents. But used occasionally, and alongside other tools, it can be a helpful additional medium to aid children’s learning.
Are we naturally prejudiced against those who are different?
We asked some babies from a mostly homogeneous Caucasian English village to choose between two adults to play with. One looked like them, with white skin. The other was Asian. The babies chose the woman who was white, even when they had watched her hand out toys in a way that was unfair, which would normally put them off.
Does this mean we are naturally “biased”? Absolutely not. What it demonstrates is how babies are able to detect differences. Skin colour was chosen in the study because it is easily visible – we could have done the same thing with facial hair on men and results would be similar. Other research has found white babies raised in diverse families or communities do not have the same preferences. Racial preferences are not innate; they are learned. This shows we can create more inclusive societies. The key is exposure to “difference” at a young age.
What this points to is that these roles are socially created. That the world is not fixed