months help: If a pregnant mother and her surroundings are completely silent for all nine months when the fetus is growing, does the newborn baby still cry? - Help.com

I’m pretty sure it’s just instinct.

All animals are born with instincts instilled in them. Even if a mother was paralized at birth and was in a surrounding where no sound was ever emitted, the child would still very likely be normal and would cry at birth. The DNA of a person doesn’t change from just one generation, but instead from several hundred generations. As humans if you follow the evolutionary path of man we have looked like humans for a very long time, but if you look far enough back you will see we hunched, were much hairier, and had much more muscle.

I’m a midwife and it’s 100% instinct to cry, they cry with stimulation, ie rubbing with a towel, its nothing to do with them hearing voices outside of the womb, as if it were - do you think they would have the mental capacity to mimic?

I say play classical music, Bach and Beethoven and pray for the best . Every child is unique.

TheGeneralThings wrote:

Dæmon wrote:
I’m pretty sure it’s just instinct.

I’m not so certain about that though. It could be true (such as how snakes already know how to fend for themselves when they hatch from an egg), but a fetus is within its mother’s surroundings which are usually full of her speech; for that reason babies often are more comfortable with their mother’s voice than their father’s, but I wonder what would happen if there were complete silence; whether it’s nature or nurture.

I’ve spent a good deal of time learning about Normal Child Psychology, and even babies who are born 100% completely deaf are able to cry. They can’t hear themselves or others, but they can FEEL the vibrations of the crying in their chest.

⚜Pixie⚜ wrote:
I’m a midwife and it’s 100% instinct to cry, they cry with stimulation, ie rubbing with a towel, its nothing to do with them hearing voices outside of the womb, as if it were - do you think they would have the mental capacity to mimic?

It’s actually a form of language, not just noise. A newborn in a hospital room filled with other newborns might start crying, and the other babies will start crying too. Not only that, but they change their voices and pitch to match the baby that started crying.

Babies are truly fascinating people.

Babies will always cry when they need something. It’s how they get held, fed, changed, and attended to while they are so little. They know when they make noise, it gets our attention so we can pay attention to them!

Jackie O! wrote:
Babies will always cry when they need something. It’s how they get held, fed, changed, and attended to while they are so little. They know when they make noise, it gets our attention so we can pay attention to them!

Exactly. And when you are around the baby all the time, you can tell whether the cry is a “hungry” cry or some other kind, just by recognizing how it is different.