Again, I was humbled at how little credit I give to babies! I knew they understood more than I thought, but this chapter about children and emotions/development was pretty revealing (Erford, 2017). I didn’t realize that by 2 months, an infant already has situated self-awareness and can differentiate between themselves and the world. That is amazing considering they are a whole 2 months old at that point! Not just that, but they are able to begin social referencing and identify an expression with an object at as early as 2 months old! This is going to be a weird statement, but I kind of have a cognitive dissonance issue when it comes to learning about child development in terms of biology and survival. On one hand, learning about the infant’s innate biological propensities for survival is incredibly fascinating and fosters a lot of compassion. Not that people don’t show children compassion but understanding that a baby cries or has a meltdown or laughs or whatever it may be because their survival instincts are hard at work trying to survive is incre
dible and gives a lot of understanding. They’re amygdales are looking for perceived threats and doing what they can to let their caregivers, whom they’re completely dependent upon for survival, know that something is wrong. That is amazing! One the other hand, sometimes I feel like it slightly takes the magic out when you learn that basically everything is done for survival, even falling in love. I love to learn those things and I think it can really give some good perspective and, again, compassion on a whole new level, but it kind of takes away the magic, I guess. A couple weeks ago, in lecture, Dr. Hartman asked the women why they wanted to have more children if childbirth was so difficult and everyone said it was worth it and they had amnesia, etc. I wanted to say “oxytocin”, ha. Now, I’ve never had children and I am very grateful for oxytocin, but sometimes learning biology takes the innocence out of something. I do believe God gave us the ability to feel emotions and connection on what seems like a metaphysical plane, and that helps, haha.