All Babies Are Born Unique

Hear hear! Anyone who has had any exposure to an infant (a brother, a sister, a child of an older relative, or one's own baby) knows that this is absolutely true. A baby comes out of the mother's womb utterly and absolutely unique, and stays unique for the rest of her or his life. Despite what 'experts' may say, all babies born unique By James Dobson • January 31, 2009 Dear Dr. Dobson: I was taught in my psych class that babies come into the world devoid of personality, and the environment then stamps its image. Do you disagree? Dr. Dobson: Philosophers Locke and Rousseau told us in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that babies came into the world as "tabula rasas," or "blank slates," upon which society and the environment wrote the fundamentals of personality. But they were wrong. We now know that every newborn is unique from every other baby, even from the first moments outside the womb. Except for identical twins, triplets, etc., no two are alike in biochemistry or genetics. How foolish of philosophers and behavioral scientists to have thought otherwise. If God makes every grain of sand unique and every snowflake like no other, how simplistic to have believed that He mass-produces little human robots. That is nonsense. We are, after all, made in His image. Just ask the real experts -- the mothers who understand their babies better than anyone. They'll tell you that each of their infants had a different "feel," -- a different personality -- from the first moment they were held. If these mothers are eventually blessed with six or eight or even twenty children, they will continue to say emphatically that every one of them was unique and distinct from the others when only one hour old. They are right -- and their perceptions are being confirmed by scientific inquiry. Dear Dr. Dobson: What else does research tell us about the personalities of newborns? Dr. Dobson: One of the most ambitious studies yet conducted took a period of three decades to complete. That investigation is known in professional literature as the New York Longitudinal Study. The findings from this investigation, led by psychiatrists Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas, were reported in their excellent book for parents entitled, "Know Your Child." Chess and Thomas found that babies not only differ significantly from one another at the moment of birth, but those differences tend to be rather persistent throughout childhood. Even more interestingly, they observed three broad categories or patterns of temperaments into which the majority of children can be classified. First, they referred to "the difficult child," who is characterized by negative reactions to people, intense mood swings, irregular sleep patterns and feeding schedules, frequent periods of crying and violent tantrums when frustrated. Does that sound familiar? I described those individuals many years ago as "strong-willed" children. The second pattern is called "the easy child," who manifests a positive approach to people, quiet adaptability to new situations, regular sleep pattern and feeding schedules, and a willingness to accept the rules of the game. The authors concluded, "Such a youngster is usually a joy to his or her parents, pediatrician and teachers." Amen. My term for the easy child is "compliant." The third category was given the title "slow-to-warm-up" or "shy." These youngsters respond negatively to new situations and they adapt slowly. However, they are less intense than difficult children, and they tend to have regular sleeping and feeding schedules. When they are upset or frustrated, they typically withdraw from the situation and react mildly, rather than explode with anger and rebellion. Not every child fits into one of these categories, of course, but approximately 65 percent do. Drs. Chess and Thomas also emphasized that babies are fully human at birth, being able immediately to relate to their parents and learn from their environments. I doubt if that news will come as a surprise to most mothers, who never believed in the "blank slate" theory, anyway. It should not be difficult to understand why these findings from longitudinal research have been exciting to me. They confirm my own clinical observations, not only about the wonderful complexity of human beings, but also about the categories of temperament identified by Drs. Chess and Thomas.