We were blessed with our first child in late December of last year. He’s now a bit over three months old. He’s a great kid - sleeps all night, feeds well, all that stuff. And there are plenty of times when his face just lights up and he gives us this great ear-to-ear smile. Heart melting stuff. However the majority of the time he seems to be intensely working things out. He gazes upon objects and people and you can practically see the cogs turning in his head as he tries to come to grips with what he’s seeing. He does this for long periods of time and the impression he conveys is not a being with an infant’s sense of delight, but a little tiny serious human.
Now, I have no doubt that many, many babies are like this, and it’s well within the bounds of conventional behavior, but my question is if you have had a serious thinker of a tot, did this continue into toddlerhood and beyond? Is this perhaps an early indication of his future approach to life?
I hasten to add that parenthood is wonderful and we’re all doing really well, I’m just struck by what an apparently serious little mite he is, and was interested in hearing about your experiences.
I think there is some kind of rule on the Dope that you can’t post about babies or puppies or kittens without also posting a pic!
Our daughter is 3 1/2. She was also a pretty serious baby. She’d laugh and smile and have fun, but there were many times when she would just look at someone as if she were “taking their measure” … very disconcerting somehow.
What we’ve found is that she is still a real thinker - she reasons things out and puzzles things out and comes up with some great comments and observations and questions - it’s fascinating. She is much more of a goofball now, but the wheels are always turning. It’s hard sometimes to admit you’ve been outwitted by a 3 year old!
As a baby she was late in meeting all of the “milestones” - rolling, sitting, crawling, walking, talking … but once she did them, she was nearly perfect at them. Our thoughts are that she was waiting until she’d figured out exactly how to do something before she even attempted it.
Enjoy your baby and record as many memories as you can - photos, videos, notes … there is so much you’ll forget, and it’s so fun to look back. I regret not having videos of her crying, babbling, first words … sounds are hard to remember.
I’ve been around a lot of babies. I know that they aren’t supposed to be able to see anything much when they are born. From the first day our youngest would look intently into your eyes and study. She was a pretty serious baby. Then she turned into a goofball. But she is scary smart.
In my limited experience (only one kid) what fascinated me the most is that every time I had him figured out, his interests and traits would change. I bet your little guy goes through a dozen changes in his first year. He may be Serious Dude now while he’s getting a handle on hands and toes and cool shit, and he’ll move to Goofy Dude who loves to engage in a game of No, You Pick It Up! Yeah, he’ll laugh at the fact that he can get you to fetch the toy for him a gazillion times when he wings it from his high chair. They fluctuate drastically throughout that first year.
One of my three kids was like this as a baby. I discovered this when she was 2 (count 'em, two) days back from the hospital, and still using those umbilical cord safe newborn diapers 'cause the stub hadn’t fallen off yet.
She already had a cold :(, and a very stuffy nose. I took a page from what I remembered my mother doing with me as a child and used a thin piece of toilet paper rolled up into a little strand and tickled her in the nose (slightly up the nostril) with it. She blinked, and sneezed violently, expelling a lot of the mucus.
When I went to repeat it on the other nostril, she pushed my hand away! And it was no accident. When I went to do it again, she pushed my hand away AGAIN! And when I looked at her face, she was… ANGRY! Like, glaring at me!
I said to myself, “Is this normal for a baby with her freakin’ umbilical cord still on her?!”
In line with Loach’s little 'un, she was (and still is) very smart. More than that though, she’s very, very willful. Her “Terrible Twos” started before she was 1. She went through a phase of insisting that she do everything, EVERYTHING herself – putting on clothes, shoes, etc. – even though she wasn’t really able to do it yet. If I put her shoes on for her because we were late and in a rush, she’d kick them off and start over.
My nephew was - and still is - something like this. It’s actually a big problem with many things because he hangs back, studies what’s going on, then moves to join in, by which time the dance or whatever activity it is almost finished, so he gets very frustrated. So he’s got to learn to just dive in.
As an adult, on the rare occasions when I talk to people about my childhood the most common response I get is that they can’t imagine me as a child. It’s a surprisingly astute observation because I’ve been extremely serious all the way back to infancy. I’m actually a delightful person to be with but as an infant, toddler, child, teenager, and adult there’s always been a pretty obvious thinly veiled essence of gravity.
It’s funny, while I’ve obviously matured an incredible amount from toddlerhood to an adult I often feel I’ve been, as you said, a tiny serious human all along who hasn’t changed fundamentally. I never really thought about it before - I wonder if it’s an uncommon point of view?
I think babies are generally not as carefree and goofy as many adults seem to think. Sure, they like to laugh when happy - but the world is a complicated place and a lot of hard work (which adults often call play when done by children) is needed to work it all out.
I don’t think 3 mos. old babies are all that smiley and playful anyway. We have a number of pictures of our son holding his wrist with his other hand and watching how it works at that age. Pictures of him at 7 months show lots of smiles though.
My son is five months old. When he is interacting with someone, he tends to smile, and laugh. However, when he is playing with his toys, or doing something, he tends to be very serious. I think that its normal for infants. They are processing a lot of information and learning how to control their limbs. For them, it is a lot of hard work.
The first expression I remember well enough on my nephew’s face was probably made more fun by his tendency towards a lazy left eye. So he used to look at me with a kind of permanently skeptical “I’m not buying this, Auntie, you’re full of crap as usual” as if his mother had passed on some kind of disposition towards disbelieving anything I say. (That’s what you get for successfully messing with the heads of your younger siblings.)
He’s almost nineteen months now, and takes a lot of things intensely seriously (listening to songbirds, building with Duplo blocks, fitting two train wagons together, and finding every single bug and worm in Richard Scarry’s drawings, for example.) What really makes him go off in paroxysms of laughter is learning new words. Take the “I can’t believe they seriously call it this!” chuckle you get out of learning a new language and amplify it to eleven million.
My daughter is the same. She’s 12 months old now, and inclined to goofiness, but still gets that serious, intent expression when she’s checking something out for the first time. She’s also like that with people she doesn’t recognise, so I get a lot of “Oooh, I don’t think she likes me!” and “Oooh, she’s very serious, isn’t she!”, but she just needs time. Once she’s comfortable around you, the cheesy grin gets seriously overused, and making her laugh is hysterical because she has the dorkiest laugh you’ve ever heard.
I remember being that child… studying things and thinking intently about them. I think she’s going to be another me (Og help the world).
That’s what all baby’s do at that age. They’re not really fixated on figuring out what an object is but more figuring out how their vision works.
Focusing, tracking objects, getting the eyes to work in tandem, distinguishing colors, etc. all need to be developed. We’re all born with two eyes and a brain but it takes a while for the brain to figure out what it’s seeing.
During their first month they can’t even focus more than a foot or two away.
Loving all the feedback, by the way. We figure he’ll probably be smart, but then we also figure all new parents think that. Just yesterday he spent about 15 minutes working out how to put his own pacifier in his mouth. Putting it in…taking it out…putting it in…taking it out…putting it…, well, you get the idea.
My chest swelled with pride. Oh dear, I’m becoming one of THOSE parents!!!
I was a serious Baby. But I loved to smile and everything, but I was one of those kids that just repeatedly tested things over and over with an intent look on my face with a huge smile when i figured it out (there exists a 2 hour video tape of me as a toddler in a kiddie pool where I kid you not- I poured water thru a sieve for the entirety of the video until I understood why the sieve wouldn’t fill up with water but the bucket would. My cousin’s family owns this video, as it’s 2 hours of him playing along side me but actually playing in the pool while i sit there and pour water in and out of the bucket and the sieve trying to figure out what’s different).
But yeah, I became a happy kid and all, but I always had VERY serious thoughts and was always told that I had an old soul sorta thing cuz I’d become curious about death and religion and ask all sorts of hard questions. But I’m doing just fine now at the Age of 23 and finished college and in a post graduate program and all.
Its early, but if it turns out he may be turning into a serious kid- you might read to him and get him interested in a healthy appreciation for the library. I loved to read about how things worked AND I loved to read fantasy and creative stories to fill my head with thoughts. Other kids would run around like silly children, I kinda read about far off lands and WWII Air crafts and ancient Dinosaurs and the like… So yeah- just enjoy whatcha got, and just give him the chance to develop into whatever he wants- but I def. recommend stimulating his imagination then a lot with puzzles, books and finding out how things worked- I always enjoyed that sort of thing as a child.
