Suddenly Teens: Crazy Baby Vibes

Missy Younger contends that it’s weird, if nothing more, that some folks can “read” other people through wordless messages. She wants no part of my belief that training in certain disciplines helps in this matter. What’s more, she is not willing to be a party to any discussion about how select individuals are “naturals” when it comes to this talent. Simply, my little girl is freaked out by the concept that some persons can assess qualities of other peoples’ history (or status quo) based on miniscule facial expressions and on related nonverbal communication.

 

Unsated by any of my convictions about learned capacities or about native prowess, my cutie chooses to challenge me anew. She argues that even if some people could understand the gist of folk’s emotive states based on the faces the observed make, the observers could not imaginably understand the gist of the observed if the observed are from a culture where the signaling is different from the signaling of the culture of the observer, or if the observed is preverbal. That is, she purports that telegraphing qualities such as kinesics, posture, gesture, and haptics have no bearing on meaning whatsoever, especially among persons from different geographies or in the throes of life’s rudimentary stages of developmental.

 

Since I want to bond with my sweet adolescent, in response to her objections, I allow that she is alarmed about the topic, in general, and likely, more specifically, by what she thinks will be revealed to her if she scrutinizes the matter carefully. That is, the shades of human nuance scare her. My teen is okay with ranting, with expressing her anxieties about stepping into unknown realms, but she has no wish to struggle or to otherwise take in data about items that seem frightening.

 

As a result of the combination of her need to avoid this topic and my need to stay linked with her, I willingly put aside all of my academic insights on intercultural communication in order to step cautiously when engaging her in talk about paralanguage, about the spatial arrangements of words, or about the social subtleties of architecture. I invite her to explore with me not the gaping differences among religious institutions, peer groups families, or friends, but to take small glimpses of appearant safe topics such as infants’ unarticulated vibes. As Missy Younger’s mother, I still intend to cook her cognates; I am fine with approaching the matter through a topic that is both nonthreatening and juicy.

 

Gently, I point out to my flesh and blood protégé that she is entirely confused about communication that is physical in nature. Rather than to be so obfuscated as to be impossible to read, little humans’ mannerisms, for instance, tend to be so universal as to be easily comprehended by even the most rhetorically dense person. That is, babies’ facial expressions and gestures tend to be of a single kind, worldwide, and tend to be fairly easily understood, across the globe, to boot.

 

At a rudimentary level, it is accepted that very young infants cry to in response to, rather than as a catalyst for, changes in their environments. Pain, hunger, thirst, wetness, and other corporeal alterations bring on, in most cases, that high, insistent sound that all people associate with disturbed young ones.

 

In addition, slightly older infants, although frequently noted to “smile” from gas, can not be manipulated into states of contentment. They are too separated from mature social norms to be manipulated by bribes of new cloths, reduced chores, or trips to the library.  Tots’ affective states are pure in both their ends and means. “Happy babies” can be understood as such no matter the clime in which they are found.

 

The reverse is true, too; infants, as well as their slightly older, still preverbal, siblings, can “read” us towering adults without being able to comprehend any of our words. Consider, for example, the research documented in countless places that demonstrates that young ones can accurately discern between their mums and their bottles.

 

Wee persons are intuitively privy to the knowledge that the rubber item is a literal dummy, an object lacking maternal heat, softness, and taste and that the breast is best. Accordingly, nurslings are apt to “complain” bitterly to their babysitters when left without life’s essential goodness and to brighten, immediately, upon hearing the voice of their primary caretakers. No words need be exchanged for an infant to know the circumstances, or lack thereof, in which it finds itself

 

Think, as well, about kids past infancy, but not yet fully bloomed as toddlers, who have learned to tell when we “giants” are oblivious to their goings on, i.e. when our boundaries have been loosened. A slouch or sigh on our part can bring on a race for independence that often involves large quantities of overturned furniture, vast amounts of spilled liquids and impossible combinations of hand prints with walls.

 

Some tiny beings, as shown by their innocent seeming grins, will gladly deconstruct an entire collection of hundreds of stamps, bought to post their siblings’ birth announcements, for instance, only to claim the reinforcements located along those postage marks’ edges. Likewise, they will, without the slightest actual malice or fabricated mortification, dig the dirt out of our prized houseplants. In these cases, the actors have “read” that our guards, however temporarily, were and that, consequently, they were at liberty to commit mad deeds.

 

Why else might our precious offspring interpret our smiles or eye blinks as having extended “permission” to them to bite our ankles, fiddle with our toilet levers, especially while we are in our showers, to empty our most packed clothing drawers or to deconstruct the contents of our closets?  Prelingual children “read” our cues.

 

I gather my teenager to me in a hug as I conclude that not only can folk interpret the bodily characteristics of infants, but that also that infants, for the sakes of growth and survival can and must do the same. I say nothing more to my daughter, though, about unarticulated communication, but elect, instead, to I stroke her head in a reassuring gesture. In fact, I change the subject to talk about the bug she saw crawling on her bathroom floor. I rub her hand as I tell her that I think we ought to get a kitty to seek and destroy that bothersome beetle.

 

In response, she gives me a squeeze, kisses my cheek and flutters her hand as she skips off. It was inevitable, in her esteem, which I would come to my senses about the lack of information conveyed in nonverbal communication and change the subject.

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