A baby cannot taste salt until it is 4 months old. The delay may be related to the development of kidneys, which start to process sodium at about that age.
In medieval Europe, leeches were commonly used to treat babies’ illnesses. For example, leeches were placed on a baby’s windpipe for croup. Additionally, teething babies were commonly purged or bled.
In China, a baby is born with a birth defect every 30 minutes. Birth defects in that country have increased nearly 40% since 2001.
The protein that keeps a baby’s skull from fusing is called “noggin.”
A baby’s eyes are 75% of their adult size, but its vision is around 20/400. By six months, a baby’s vision should reach 20/20.
Newborns are more likely to turn their head to the right than to the left.
The inner ear is the only sense organ to develop fully before birth. It reaches its adult size by the middle of pregnancy.
Within a few days of birth, a baby can distinguish between the touch of bristles that are of different diameters.
A baby has around 10,000 taste buds, far more than adults. They are not just on the tongue but also on the sides, back, and roof of the mouth. Eventually these extra taste buds disappear. Adults have 206 bones. When babies are born, they have 300. Their bones fuse as they grow, resulting in fewer bones as adults.
The intestines of a newborn are about 11 feet long. The length will double by the time the baby grows to adulthood.
A newborn urinates about every 20 minutes and then roughly every hour at 6 months.
Human babies are the only primates who smile at their parents
If a person who was born 8 lbs. and 20 in. at birth continued growing at the same rate as he does the first year, by the time he reached 20, he’d be 25 ft. tall and weigh nearly 315 lbs.
A baby is born in the world every three seconds.
Famous premature babies include Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Napoleon Bonaparte, Mark Twain, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, Stevie Wonder, Johann Goethe, and Sir Winston Churchill.
The largest number of babies born to a woman is 69. From 1725-1765, a Russian peasant woman gave birth to 16 sets of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets.
In 1978, the first baby was born in Antarctica: Emilio Marcos Palma.
Each year, over four million babies are born in the U.S.
Approximately 80% of infants are born with some form of birthmark, usually “stork bites” and “port wine stains.”
Approximately two or three of every 1,000 children in the United States are born deaf or hard-of-hearing. More lose their hearing later in childhood.
Babies can suffer serious health effects if their mothers have an STD, including death, low birth weight, conjunctivitis (an eye infection), pneumonia, neonatal sepsis (infection in the baby’s blood stream), neurologic damage, blindness, deafness, acute hepatitis, meningitis, chronic liver disease, and cirrhosis. Many of these problems can be prevented if the mother receives prenatal care that includes screening for STDs.
Shaking one’s head to indicate “no” may have derived from full babies
Some scientists suggest that shaking the head to mean “no” derives from newborns turning their head away from food when they are full.
A baby can recognize the smell and voice of its mother at birth. It takes a few weeks before a baby can see the difference between its mother and other adults.
A baby’s first social smile appears between four and six weeks after birth.
The heaviest baby on record to survive was a 22 lb. 8 oz. Italian baby born in 1955. In 1879, a woman in Canada gave birth to a 23 lb. 1.92 oz. baby that died 11 hours after birth.
In the United States, more babies are born on Wednesday than on other days of the week. Sunday is the slowest day.
In the United States, more babies are born in late summer and early fall than in other times of the year. February tends to be the month when the least babies are born.
Utah has the highest birthrate in the U.S., at about 21 babies per 1,000 people. Vermont has the lowest birth rate, with slightly more than 10 babies born per 1,000 people.
In 1970, the average age for a first-time mom in the U.S. was 21. In 2008, it was 25.
At birth, babies have no kneecaps. Kneecaps do not develop completely until after six months.
New parents in the U.S. will spend approximately $7,000 the first year on baby items
It is estimated that new parents in the U.S. will spend on average $7,000 the first year on a new baby’s diapers, formula, and day care. This does not include medical costs.
Babies born in May usually weigh on average 200 grams more than babies born in other months.
The number of babies born to single women is at record levels. In 2010, there were 9.8 million single moms living with children under 18 in the U.S., up from 3.4 million in 1970.
There were about 1,049 male babies born for every 1,000 female babies in 2006 in the United States. This ratio has been consistent for the past 60 years.
In 2006, there were 32.1 pairs of twins born for every 1,000 births in the United States. This rate has remained roughly the same, though between 1980 and 2004, the rate rose 70%.
Over half a million babies (1 in 8) are born prematurely in the United States each year. Low birth weight rate has increased 9% since 2000 and 24% since the mid 1980s.
Research has shown that cesarean babies are more likely to have breathing difficulties, as it is thought they may miss out on important hormonal and physiological changes that occur during labor.
chubby baby From conception to birth, a baby’s weight will increase 3,000 million times
During the nine months between conception and birth, a baby’s weight increases by 3,000 million times. Between birth and the end of its second year, an infant will have quadrupled in size.
In four or five out of every 100 newborn babies, there is discharge of milk from the nipples. This is due to unusually high levels of the mother’s hormones that leak across the placenta during pregnancy. Premature babies never have this discharge, only those who are full term.
A baby’s head is proportionally huge, being one-quarter of the total body length, compared to only one-eighth of the total adult’s length.
The grasp of a newborn baby is so strong that its whole body can hang in midair, with its bent fingers supporting its weight.
At the moment of birth, a baby’s heart beats at 180 pulses per minute. Within a few hours, the rate falls to 140 pulses. At 1 year old, the infant heart rate is 115 beats per minute. An adult’s average resting level is 70-80 beats a minute.
Research shows that a baby responds positively to the fragrance of its mother’s breasts and ignores breast pads used by other women. Even more striking is the discovery that a blindfolded woman has the ability to identify her own child from a host of other babies by scent alone.
New babies prefer looking at a drawing of a face rather than a random pattern, and they prefer smiling faces to grumpy ones.
Up until 7 months old, a baby can breathe and swallow at the same time.
The youngest person ever to give birth is a five-year old Peruvian girl
Lina Medina, a 5-year-old Peruvian girl, was the youngest person to ever give birth. She gave birth to a boy on May 14, 1939.
An average baby will go through approximately 7,500 diapers a year.
On average, female babies spend a day longer in the womb than male babies. White babies, on average, spend five days longer inside their mothers than black babies, while Indian babies spend six days longer in the womb than white babies.
The very best chance a baby has of surviving gestation is when its mother is aged 22, an age which has been described as “the age of fecundity” in humans.
The chances of giving birth to twins are especially high in certain parts of West Africa. In Nigeria, for example, the odds are 22-1. Conversely, women in Japan are less likely to have twins, with the odds as high as 200-1.
The average weight of a baby at birth is 7-8 lbs. The smallest baby ever to survive weighed only 8.5 oz. at birth.
On the whole, boy babies are slightly heavier than girl babies. The average weight of a newborn boy is 7 lbs. 10 oz. while that of a newborn girl is 7 lbs. 2 oz.
The brain of a newborn accounts for 10% of its total body weight. In adults this figure is down to 2%. By the end of the first year, an infant’s brain increases in size two and half times, and by the end of the fifth year, it is three times what it was at birth. At all stages, the male brain is slightly larger than that of the female.
