What Babies Want

Narrated by actor Noah Wyle, What Babies Want combines interviews, re-enactments, photographs, and graphics to explore what babies need to emotionally thrive (namely, physical contact, love, and acceptance), while also arguing that the birthing experience can leave a lasting impression on a child's psychological makeup. Much of the advice from the authors, neuro-psychologists, doctors, and midwives interviewed here matches what expectant parents read about or are taught in today's birthing classes regarding the importance of prenatal and postnatal bonding: children should be brought into immediate physical contact with their mothers after birth to promote wellness and confidence; touch (nursing, holding, caressing, and playing) is essential for a child's sense of love and well-being; and babies don't like the “violence” of bright lights, noises, and rough handling in hospital birthing rooms. But the film also ventures into areas likely to cause skepticism. For example, the therapeutic chanting and belly-touching by a West African “Keeper of the Rituals” during sessions with pregnant women is well within the boundaries of Western society's more open-minded embrace of holistic medicine, but many viewers won't know what to make of one father's self-confessed primal urge to lick his baby clean, or claims of psychological manifestations of birth trauma later in life (one man attributes his heretofore inexplicable sense of abandonment to his mother's attempts to push him back in the womb during his ill-timed delivery on the side of the highway; we're also told that the arrangement of a young girl's doll figurines signals her attempt to deal with being separated from her mother in the hospital delivery room). Even the model of consciousness used in the film--a converging of bio-neurology and psychology--is somewhat paradoxical, since the contention that children are hardwired from birth seems to be contradicted by the fact that they can apparently “heal” through therapy and bonding later in life. Still, this is recommended, overall, for larger parenting and psychology collections. Aud: C, P. (A. Cantú)