Between four and seven months, your baby may undergo a dramatic change in personality. At the beginning of this period, she may seem relatively passive and preoccupied with getting enough food, sleep, and affection.
“You'll have a sense of a child's temperament basically from birth,” says Vanessa Lapointe, PhD, a registered child psychologist and author of Parenting Right from the Start: Laying a Healthy Foundation in the Baby and Toddler Years. “Most parents will retrospectively be able to say 'they came out that way. '”
Curious or reserved? Your baby is born with his own temperament, but that's just the beginning. Even though genetics do play a role, everything your child experiences, sees and hears influences him and contributes to gradually building his character and personality.
They Recognize You
"Within a few weeks, babies can recognize their caregiver and babies prefer them to other people," says Alison Gopnik, Ph. D., author of The Philosophical Baby and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Your baby finds comfort in your arms
When an infant can be soothed by your voice or physical comfort, this is another way she shows she trusts you. Infants identify caretakers by sight, smell, and sound, and when any of these provide a level of comfort to a baby it is evidence of an established bond.
1-3 Months
The first three months with your baby often seem the hardest. Sleep-deprived parents can feel overwhelmed, but that is normal and you will quickly learn how to read your baby's cues and personality. Don't worry about “spoiling” your baby at this stage.
Personality: A child's personality is determined by several different components, including environment, character, and you guessed it—temperament. Temperament: Temperament refers to the genetic, inborn traits that control how your baby approaches the world.
Because boys have the sex chromosomes XY, they must inherit their Y chromosome from their father. This means they inherit all the genes on this chromosome, including things like sperm production and other exclusively male traits.
Among the traits found most strongly determined by heredity were ambition, vulnerability to stress (neuroticism), leadership, risk-seeking, a sense of well-being and, surprisingly, respect for authority.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) note that a baby can show signs of ASD from the age of 9 months . However, the Autism Science Foundation states that early signs of ASD may appear in babies as young as 2 months of age.
By two months, most babies will look happy to see you, and they'll smile when you talk to them. For many parents, those smiles are a heartwarming first glimpse of true affection. By four months, your baby will be smiling unprompted, hoping to catch your attention with a little “I love you” from across the room.
From your smell and voice, your baby will quickly learn to recognise you're the person who comforts and feeds them most, but not that you're their parent. However, even from birth, your baby will start to communicate with signals when they're tired and hungry, or awake and alert. Your baby is learning all the time.
Genetically, you actually carry more of your mother's genes than your father's. That's because of little organelles that live within your cells, the mitochondria, which you only receive from your mother.
Your children inherit their eye colors from you and your partner. It's a combination of mom and dad's eye colors – generally, the color is determined by this mix and whether the genes are dominant or recessive. Every child carries two copies of every gene – one comes from mom, and the other comes from dad.
Genes responsible for hair color come from both parents. Although the genes passed down from a child's parents determine hair color, variations can result in a child having a different hair color than both parents.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no scientific evidence that suggests all firstborn daughters necessarily resemble their fathers.
Currently, genetic engineering allows us to select our baby's gender and eye color as well as modify the risk of certain illnesses. In the very near future, however, we could have a say over other more controversial characteristics.
“For babies, it's contentedness, serenity and security that make them happy. Twenty times a day, something upsets them and then magically, arms pick them up and they're fed, or someone comes and rocks them.” (We can relate. It sounds a little like PMS.)
DNA. Everyone knows that DNA is what determines your baby's appearance. But DNA is a very complex subject. Everything from hair color, eye color, height, and weight to the placement of dimples or freckles can be dictated by you or your partner's (or both!)
General satisfaction with life increased in the first months after birth and peaked when the child reached 6 months old.
In fact, age 8 is so tough that the majority of the 2,000 parents who responded to the 2020 survey agreed that it was the hardest year, while age 6 was better than expected and age 7 produced the most intense tantrums.
Those born in September are, apparently, the smartest out of the entire year. According to Marie Claire, a study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that there's a clear correlation between the month during which you were born and how smart you are.
We inherit more genes from our maternal side. That's because it's the egg, not the sperm, that hands down all of the mitochondrial DNA.