Psychology of Childhood and Adolescence in an Urban Context

I recently saw a film on babies named National Geographic: Science of Babies. The film explored the ways babies develop in their first year of life, from their first breath to their first step. This relates to the development of the brain when a human is born. It talked about the helpless beings that babies are when they first arrive into the world and how they slowly adapt. At first, when a baby is born, the amount of oxygen or the first amount of air to the baby’s lungs and brain is one of the most crucial parts of living. When in the mother’s womb, the baby is solely dependent on oxygen from the mother’s placenta, and must learn how to breathe on its own when coming into the world.

A baby relies a great amount on caregivers in their first months and years of their life. The film gives a comparison to other primates, such as elephants, seals, and turtles and shows that those animals tend to adapt to their environment as soon as they are born, which is fairly quickly. Babies, however, take a while to adapt to their environments and depend a great deal on their caregivers in order to survive.  The film then goes on and emphasizes the development of the brain in babies. A newborn baby is born with over 100,000,000 neurons but after a year that number nearly doubles in size. A baby’s brain builds itself through adapting to the environment and in turn makes babies develop a learned behavior as to how they develop. Reflexes, such as sucking and gripping on to a person’s finger, are relevant in the first stages of a baby’s life, which is what we also learned in this class.

The different stages of a baby’s life are also seen in the film. It shows that at just 3 months of age, a baby can lift their head and reach out to get an object, however their eyesight is not fully developed as of yet. At the age of 6 months, their vision is nearly as good as adults, and they learn to differentiate facial expressions. What I found interesting was when the movie showed that children with autism or who develop autism in the future tend to have trouble differentiating facial expressions at this stage of their life.  I didn’t think that autism could be detected so soon in a child’s life. By 8 to 9 months, a baby’s nervous system is more fully developed and many babies start to crawl. However, another thing that I found interesting was that the film shows that many people think that crawling is a necessary stage in order for a baby to start walking, and this is a misconception. I, myself, thought that crawling was a necessary stage before a baby developed the ability to walk, but I guess I was wrong. A lot of babies do not even crawl before walking. They go from sitting up to learning how to walk. At about a year of age, most children take their first steps and learn to speak their first words. Overall, I thought that this film was a great film on describing the development of babies and gave me new insight on their development.