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You're in a meeting with a new agency.  You're not sure who's the boss .  What do you do? Get a baby. No joke.  A new study says even babies can tell who's boss. The charismatic colleague, the natural leader, the life of the party – all are personal qualities that adults recognize instinctively, according to newswise.com. These socially dominant types, according to repeated studies, also tend to accomplish and earn more, from accolades and material wealth to friends and romantic partners, the web site reports.   "This social hierarchy may be so naturally ingrained, University of Washington researchers say, that toddlers as young as 17 months old not only can perceive who is dominant, but also anticipate that the dominant person will receive more rewards," adds the site. "This tells us that babies are sorting through things at a higher level than we thought. They're attending to and taking into consideration fairly sophisticated concepts,...

I t sure was true for us.  Babies born in the winter learn to crawl sooner than summer time babies, according to a new study. Our son, born in June, didn't learn to crawl until he was a year old, and didn't walk till he was almost 17 months.  I panicked about the walking.  People said, "Enjoy it," but I just wanted him to be like the other babies -- now running and jumping and climbing, while our son just tried to slide along the dirty floors in restaurants and anywhere we put him down. Then, one night (I was sleeping), my husband was reading the paper and looked up and thought, oh, there's Phillip, walking across the floor to me.  Say what ??? Like most kids who start walking at a later age, there was no falling down or bumping into things for him.  Once he walked, he walked. T he season of a baby’s birth influences its motor development during its first year of life, a new study by University of Haifa researcher's shows, according to newswise.com. B...

Want to know how good a parent you'll be? Play with dolls. Not just any dolls but ones that having expectant parents role-play interacting with an infant using a doll can help predict which couples may be headed for co-parenting conflicts when their baby arrives, newswise.com reports. Researchers videotaped 182 couples in the third trimester of pregnancy while they played with a doll that they were told represented the baby they were about to have. Researchers analyzed how the couple interacted with each other around the doll. The couples were videotaped again nine months after the birth of their baby to see how they actually played together. Results showed that couples acted as similarly toward each other with the real baby as they did with the doll – in both positive and negative ways. “The extent to which couples support or undermine each other’s interactions with the doll predicts their co-parenting behavior a year later,” said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, co-a...

I had those friends who bought all the Baby Einstein tapes and started using them when their babies were in utero.  And there's that commercial where two-year-olds are reading Shakespeare. But a new study  has found that these parents can no longer feel superior.  Babies cannot learn to read. “While we cannot say with full assurance that infants at this age cannot learn printed words, our results make clear they did not learn printed words from the baby media product that was tested,” says Susan Neuman, a professor in NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Teaching and Learning and the study’s senior author, at newswise.com   Let's face it. We all want to believe our kids are special, even gifted. (My mother always used to brag I spoke in full sentences at one.) But the truth is that, while they may be, the only ones these products have an influence on are -- parents. In exit interviews, newswise reports, "There was the belief among parents that their babies were lea...

I just did it yesterday, this adorable little round-cheeked,  blue-eyed curly head poking up out of the blanket.  "I could just eat you up!" How many times have we said that to a baby ?  Well, it just might be in our genes.  Of course we're not going to eat a baby.  But what we mean is they'e so scrumptious and sweet, you want to do more than just hug or kiss them.  And that feeling makes us , well, feel great, too. This reaction, which everyone has noticed or felt, could have biological underpinnings related to maternal functions, newswise.com reports. It may well, indeed, be in our brains. “The olfactory—thus non-verbal and non-visual—chemical signals for communication between mother and child are intense,” newswise.com quotes Johannes Frasnelli, a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychology. “What we have shown for the first time is that the odor of newborns, which is part of these signals, activate...

So, after all the hype, it looks like breast-feeding does provide advantages to babies.  I probably sound bitter because, as I needed to have emergency surgery less than a week after my son was born, I was just never able to do it.  (He also had a problem latching on!) According to newswise.com, a new study has found that "b reastfeeding longer is associated with better receptive language at 3 years of age and verbal and nonverbal intelligence at age 7 years." While the study showed evidence that "supports the relationship between breastfeeding and health benefits in infancy," it was less certain if it leads to better cognitive development, however. Women who breastfed the longest in the study had 3-year-olds who scored higher on a picture vocabulary test, and at 7 years, scored higher on the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test, but the breast-feeding duration was not associated with other scores. Babies that were breastfed for six months did the best. So w...

Interesting story today at smartplanet.com.   Designer babies . It's not what you think.  Or maybe it is.  But British researchers have found a way to make a baby using three people.  It's not to make sure the baby has blond hair and blue eyes, and is a girl, with a 150 IQ, but to provide additional genes to prevent "debilitating and potentially fatal mitochondrial disease." According to David Worthington, mitochondria are the parts of cells known as 'power stations' because they provide energy.  "Diseased mitochondria leaves people weak and can cause blindness, heart failure and death," he writes. This disorder affects one in every 6,500 babies in the UK, according to the BBC. The way it works is through an in-vitro fertilization procedure.  Doctors extract eggs from the mother and sperm from the father, then combine them in the lab with a third person's disease-free mitochrondria.  I remember talk about something like this when I was tryi...