Babies Cry in Their Parents' Language

Really, what do they do all day? Not much.

(NEWSER) - When John R. Barry’s sister started a blog for her baby, friends and family looked at him accusingly. “My son has been alive for about 9 months, and I never started a blog in his honor. It never occurred to me,” he writes on Salon . It made him wonder: Does his baby really need a blog? After all, Barry did keep a private diary of his child for a while—and “immediately ran out of things to write about.” More»

Babies subject to the tyranny of Photoshop, too

(NEWSER) - Even babies can't meet the media-industrial complex's exacting standards: Baby photos are airbrushed before making their way to magazines, to tweak skin tone, swap eye color, and airbrush fat lines and creases, reports the Daily Telegraph . While many are riled, to some, this is not news: "You kind of know that they do it because if you look at the front cover of magazines, most of the images don't look really real," notes the mom of a child model. More»

(NEWSER) - If you’ve had a few kids, you know that you don’t need half of the baby products littering the shelves of Babies “R” Us, but new parents are easy prey for marketers. Brad Tuttle offers a list of the silliest, most useless crap in Time:

• Crib bedding sets: The bumper pad and comforter pose suffocation hazards, meaning you pay big bucks to use half a set.
• The Wipe Warmer: “Are wipes really THAT cold?”

Women more likely than men to look away from ugly babies

(NEWSER) - A mother’s love may be “determined by facial attractiveness,” a new study suggests in finding that women were more likely than men to avert their gaze from an unattractive baby. Researchers showed men and women photos of normal and abnormal infants; men and women gave equal attractiveness ratings to the abnormal babies, but women tried harder not to look at the less-cute pictures, HealthDay News reports. More»

Research casts doubt on benefits of inducing birth at 37 or 38 weeks

(NEWSER) - New research suggests that inducing birth two or three weeks ahead of the full 40 weeks isn't as harmless as many doctors believe, the Globe and Mail reports. The study found that children born after 37 weeks tended to have IQs 1.7 points lower than those born at 38 or 39 weeks, and had a higher, though small, risk of dying in early infancy. More»