Prenatal Communication

Expectant parents and especially new dads are always looking for ways to connect with the pregnancy to make the whole thing their own to establish a bond with their kids even before the kids are born.  I got a great email on exactly that topic. 

Dear Mr. Dad: My wife and I are expecting and we find ourselves talking to our baby a lot.  Sometimes we are sure that he or she, we don’t know which, is responding to what we say.  Are we imagining things? 

In a word, no you are not imagining anything.  Although the idea may sound completely crazy the reality is that fetuses are extremely responsive to sounds from the outside world.  In one study newborns whose mothers had watched a particular soap opera when they were pregnant stopped crying whenever the shows theme song was played but infants whose mothers hadn’t watched the show had absolutely no reaction when they heard that same music.  So you gotta wonder why mature grown ups would want to spend time talking to a fetus when he could be doing something else like going out and hanging out with your buddies. 

Well the simple reason is its fun plus it may really help you establish a bond with your baby even before he’s born.  It might also work the other way to, it might help the baby establish a bond with you.  A lot of new dads get really jealous of the immediate kind of connection, the deep connection that their babies have with their mothers.  A lot of that connection might have something to do with the mother’s voice which the baby has been hearing every day for nine months, it might have more to do with that than anything else.  If you can spend some time conversing with your baby before he is born he is going to recognize and be more responsive to your voice. 

There’s some researchers out there that believe that prenatal communication, which doesn’t actually have to be limited to words, that it may stimulate the babies brains, it might trigger nerve cell development that might help them process information more efficiently.  In other words they are saying it might actually make baby smarter.  They are also saying, although not everybody agrees with this, that babies who are stimulated parentally cry less at birth and have longer attention spans, sleep better and they are less likely to develop learning disabilities and they turn out to be more creative and musical. And they might as well add in there that they are taller and more beautiful and they have better jobs when they grow up, it’s all speculation! 

There is a lot of disagreement about the effects of prenatal stimulation and whether it even works at all.  Although there is nobody out there who says it does any harm so since you are already doing it let me give you a couple of guidelines about how you might make it a little bit better. 

The first thing you need to do is take it easy, you’ve got to remember that while you want to communicate with the baby your wife has got the right to a little bit of peace and quiet every once in awhile, so you can’t just be talking non stop.  On the other hand you might want to tell her that some researchers have found that women’s whose babies were talked to before birth had shorter labors and a little bit lower of a C-section rate.  Second speak up; you want to speak loudly enough so that someone across the room can hear you.  Third keep it regular, try to put yourself on a schedule so that the baby is going to know that something is going to happen. You’ve got to ease into it by patting your wife’s belly before you start.  Don’t go over board, 15 to 20 minutes twice a day is plenty.  Fetuses need some downtime to just like regular people. 

Next, mix it up a little bit, playing the same piece of music or reading the same story every day is really great and it’s going to help the baby establish the routines but you’ve got to throw in a little bit of variety too.  Fetuses just like everybody else block out things that bore them. Finally and maybe most importantly don’t set your expectations to high.  There is no guarantee that anything you do is going to affect your baby in any way at all.  What you want to do with this thing is have fun, if you start having expectations that your baby is going to be smarter, more taller, more beautiful or whatever when the baby turns out to be just the perfect normal regular baby you might end up being disappointed.  So again make it fun.

If you’ve got a comment or question that you would like to get the dads perspective about you can drop me a line through http://www.mrdad.com, of course you can send me email from there and you can find out about the varies books I’ve written starting with The Expectant Father Going on the First Year and the Toddler Years.  I’ve got a podcast for dads, a daily podcast called The Daddy Cast and a brand new DVD that’s called Toolbox for New Dad’s.  You can also subscribe to my monthly newsletter the Mister Dad.com newsletter; you can do all of that at http://www.mrdad.com.