First Tastes and Hearing for Premature Babies

What Does It Taste Like?
The sense of taste is something that all babies have very well developed. When the baby was inside your womb, the amounts of amniotic liquid that the baby may have swallowed, according to some investigations, were more conditioned because of the taste then for other factors. But without going out and trying to sound complicated, observe the way the baby behaves when you place him or her directly over your bare chest. The baby will first smell you, but then he or she will try to make certain of the situation by opening his or her mouth and with his or her tongue, will try to find out whom this person is. When the baby is older, be prepared for everything that he or she grabs, will first go into the mouth. This is one of the tests of recognizing that our children will constantly do.

Of Course The Baby Can Hear You!
When the baby was inside of your womb, he was already capable of hearing certain sounds, which is something that has been proven through fetal movements starting from the twenty- sixth week of gestation.

On one hand this is logical because the intrauterine environment is not exactly a quiet one and if the baby does not have any specific hearing problems, he or she will naturally be able to hear.

It has been proven that amongst the things that babies can hear while inside their mother’s wombs, depending on the way they react, are able to hear: their mother’s voice, music and some of the sounds the mother hears; and a little further away, the baby can also hear the father’s voice. To the contrary, how could we explain that babies react in a determined way to a human voice immediately after birth?

Depending on the baby’s level of maturity, the baby will always tend to look for the origin of the sound he or she can hear, but this interest intensifies when it is the voice of the mother or the father.

Since it has been proven that babies that are premature suck better when they hear their mother or father’s voice, it is suggested you sing to your baby. Yes, that’s right sing to your baby. In many cultures that are less technologically developed than ours, the mothers sing to their babies when they are breastfeeding them and in some places the father joins in on the singing too. Can you imagine how interesting it would be to see the neonatal intensive care units filled with singing mothers? Ha! And besides this it would be an excellent resource to attract the mothers that doubt about breastfeeding their babies. Sometimes, however, you don’t even need to sing a known tune. The songs that we would sing to our babies anyways are not the songs that you learned while in school. The best song, without a matter of a doubt, is the one that lifts the spirit and makes the mother feel relaxed. It can even be a specific word or phrase that has a lot of meaning to you which you can then place into any rhythm or invented jingle. 

When my daughter was learning how to suck, I was sang her a religious song my mom used to sing to me when I was a child and that I never forgot. I was surprised to see my daughter’s reaction and how she started to suck on the bottle a lot stronger than normal. Normally I had to take some time to wet her lips with the milk so that she would recognize that it was time to eat or so that she would wake up. From then on, until she was around six months old, this was the only resource I needed to use when she refused to eat.