5 Babyish Activities That Babies Can’t Actually Do
When you have a baby, you keep your expectations low for what it can do. Your baby is too weak to plow the fields, too dumb to manage your finances and too immature to recommend good books. It’s good for nothing but the most babyish pursuits.
In fact, your baby isn’t even good for that. Surprisingly, babies are incapable of…
Seeing Pink and Blue
This article not your thing? Try these...
Pink and blue are the standard baby colors. The shade of blue we’re talking about is so associated with babies that we call it “baby blue.” The way we match this blue to boys and pink to girls is arbitrary and used to be the exact opposite a century ago, but this pair of colors remains firmly the choice ones when it comes to baby blankets, nurseries and gender-reveal terrorist attacks.
Just keep in mind that if you choose those colors, you picked them for your viewing pleasure, not for the baby’s. A newborn cannot see light colors like pink and baby blue. It takes them about three months to develop the cones in the eyes and the connected pathways that let them see the normal spectrum of color. Before that, you can count on their distinguishing a brilliant scarlet from a patch of gray, but pastels don’t look like anything to them.
So, we’d recommend painting the walls with black-and-white cartoon characters from the 1920s instead of pink balloons, for maximum clarity. And even then, don’t bother unless it’s the wall right next to the crib. During their first months, the baby can’t focus on anything more than a foot away.
Crying Tears
Crying is a baby’s top pastime. They cry as soon as they’re born, which is their way of both saying hello to the world and inflating the lungs. In the months that follow, cries are their only way of communicating. The crying continues for years, sometimes 80 years or more.
But during the first month of a baby’s life, take a look at exactly how it cries. It will wail at you with its mouth, but if you look to its eyes, you might be surprised to see no tears falling. Those young eyes of theirs, along with having undeveloped vision, have undeveloped lacrimal glands, which are the parts that squeeze out tears.
This means its cries work at alerting parents but not at accomplishing everything that crying is supposed to. When you cry with tears, this flushes a stress chemical out of your body (specifically the adrenocorticotropic hormone), and newborns don't get to experience that. So, the baby doesn’t get much relief from crying. Providing relief is your job.
Eating Honey
When you start feeding food to your baby at around six months or so, you go with little jars of mushy stuff, unlike anything adults eat. Though, there is one normal food in your cabinet that perhaps resembles baby food: honey. Hey, how about you give your baby some spoons of honey. They’ll love it!
Oh no, why did you do that? Why did you pause in the middle of one section of this article to take our terrible advice? You fed your baby honey, and now, it died. Honey may contain spores from Clostridium botulinum, and until the baby reaches one year or so, its digestive tract can’t deal with that. That honey might give it a case of infant botulism, resulting in paralysis.
The reason this is so surprising is honey’s otherwise the food you least have to worry about infecting you. Honey is acidic (you don’t taste the sourness, but it’s there) and contains little water, which means bacteria cannot survive in it. Honey never spoils. You can eat honey from thousands of years ago, and you’ll be fine. Even so, bacteria that couldn’t survive in there may have left spores that can ravage a baby’s nervous system.
The most surprising thing a baby can’t imbibe, however, would have to be…
Drinking Water
Swallowing water is as basic a function as you can get. You’d give water to anyone who looks thirsty, from a mouse to an ant. Not babies, though. If the kid’s under six months, no water for them.
The first reason is if they drink water, they’ll starve. They can only handle so much stuff in their stomachs at once, and if that stuff is water, it’s not milk, and they’re not getting the nutrients they need. The other reason is their kidneys aren’t developed enough to chuck out excess water from their body fast enough. That means drinking water will dilute their blood too much. The dilute blood will suck the sodium out of their cells, maybe permanently screwing up their brain.
Don’t worry about the baby getting dehydrated, though. Breastmilk or formula has plenty of water. So, don’t dilute either of those, even if you’re running short, because that could also dilute the baby’s blood and kill them.
Shivering
Returning to those simple creatures we just mentioned, we bet you can picture a mouse shivering with cold. You might be able to picture ants shivering, too, because they can. But if you’re imagining a newborn shivering when it faces the cruel world, think again. They can’t shiver. They lack the necessary muscle mass.
This means you should go reach for a blanket (pink or blue is fine), but babies that young also do have their own separate mechanism for warming up. It’s called non-shivering thermogenesis. They oxidize fat (“brown adipose tissue”), and this releases heat, even without their muscles having to move around to get that metabolism pumping.
Does this mean we can use brown adipose tissue from babies as a renewable fuel source, pouring the stuff into a furnace to heat our homes? Many experts say no.
Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.