Although your baby is still comfortably growing inside your womb, he is already developing some automatic behaviors and sensory responses that will help him interact with the world during the first four or five months after been born. These capacities are called “newborn reflexes” and while some of them will occur spontaneously as part of your baby’s daily life, others will only appear as a response to specific actions or stimuli.

According to Stanford Children’s Health there are a couple newborn reflexes that are already being rehearsed in-utero:
• Root reflex: it helps the baby find the breast or the bottle immediately after birth. When something touches the baby’s cheek, he will turn his head in the direction of the touch, searching for a food source, and begin sucking.
• Suck reflex: this is the baby’s response to anything that touches the roof of his mouth. Is because of this reflex that babies bring their feet to their mouth and start sucking a toe.
• Grasp reflex: when you touch the palm of a baby’s hand, the baby responds by closing his hand in a grasp around your finger.
• Step reflex: when a baby is held upright with his feet touching a solid surface, he will start taking steps as if dancing.

By week 32 of your pregnancy, your baby will have developed these reflexes that will be very handy once he is born. In the ultrasound you might even catch your little baby sucking his thumb, which will bring an “adorableness-overload” reflex in you, but that’s a topic for another blog post…

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