Differences between infants who reject and infants who are rejected

Certainly. I agree with that.

But at the same time, "rejecting" isn't a natural temperament. It's a learned temperament. It goes against the very nature of humans to reject others, unless they have already learned that others are unsafe.

No, I disagree with that completely. While it may be unusual, it's my no means non-existant.

Rejecting behaviors do not need to be learned. They can be a result of numerous causes. They're no harder to display than welcoming or accepting behaviors.

Wait til you have kids, haha. All infants behave on a spectrum, on a curve you might say, but all on a spectrum. Every baby displays some of both, and some display certain behaviors with more frequency than others.

That is really interesting. I wonder if your mother had anxiety or postpartum depression - something that you may have sensed. It's not he baby being personally rejecting, some people are more comfortable with babies and babies are therefore more responsive to them. Sometimes I think the parent who feels rejected is hurt or resentful. So even if not outwardly abusive, they might end up acting colder with the baby. And if this parent is the primary caregiver, then baby's emotional/social development will somehow be impacted.

If a baby's mom isn't giving off a soothing vibe, and is rather tense and stiff I would be more surprised if the baby DIDN'T reject them...

My dad was in the military when I was born and we were not living in the same city as my grandparents until I was 2 or 3. I think they came to see us a lot as the base was in the same state, but it is not like as an infant I was spending a lot of time in just my grandmother's company nor was she a primary caregiver or anything.
My sibling was the sort of infant who acts like a overstuffed teddy bear. He was super cuddly and would just hang out in my mother's or someone else's arms for hours.
Nature versus nurture I suppose.

I think the term "rejecting" is misleading since it implies choice. Newborns are all born with a temperment and they are all different though like Leah says, they all fall within a spectrum of what's "normal". It's not as common, but there are babies that aren't warm and cuddly by nature, preferring a ride in a car or stroller to being held. They aren't rejecting anyone, it's just the way they are hard wired. The problem comes when an insecure or unstable parent takes it personally and responds negatively to the baby. It will go in circles with baby and parent responding to each other.

Yes, that's so true- better to say off-putting behaviors. A child who scowls or closes up its body or wails at someone or turns away is NOT necessarily trying to communicate "I hate you" !

Much more common they're communicating unhappiness, but woe to the parent who deals with much of those behaviors:

strong ones will persevere longer in their caretaking and not see it as personal, though I do believe it wears down anyone a little eventually, helps shape the interaction,

but the ones who struggle, who internalize it, who *perceive* it as personal, who are depressed or suffering in other ways, who don't have the resiliency and ego strength and support....

that is a scary situation sometimes.

this makes me think of when my T says babies are born innocent. they are not horrible or bad. if an infant can reject there parents why cant they just be born broken or bad

Horrible and bad are value judgements.

Infants aren't capable of the higher level reasoning that would enable them to do bad or horrible things, let alone be "bad or horrible" people!

Very different for an infant to feel upset or have an impulse to be alone and scowl, cry or turn away to convey that than for an adult to do harm.

And I completely agree babies are born innocent. Can't commit a crime if you can't think it through or even perform the physical actions necessary.

You are not born broken or bad, and infants don't consciously reject their parents. They do react to or respond to their parents, but they aren't able to make judgements or decisions. So in that respect I agree with you T that they are innocent. Some people believe babies are born a "blank slate" and others believe they are born with a certain temperment, which I think is what's generally accepted now. So how they turn out is usually thought to be a combination of this inborn personality type and their environment.

My 2 girls are almost 11 years apart in age. I was 24 when I gave birth to DD1 and 35 with DD2.

DD1 was so calm and laid back and content all the time, she preferred to play on the floor and be left there, while we we're welcome to sit near her and interact, she had a strong aversion to being held. She squirmed and fussed and finally wailed if it took too long for you to get the cue.

DD2 was a Velcro baby, only content while being held, cried incessantly until she became mobile at 5 months (crawling) and was always very high-needs. I practiced attachment parenting with her, something I had never heard of back when DD1 came along.

I abruptly stopped nursing DD1 at the advice of her pediatrician, due to mastitis and his preference for formula-fed babies. She spent that whole weekend hating me, and only calmed for her father. That Monday we went back to the ped, performed a little show and tell, and he asked me what I had done to piss her off! Perfectly content in car seat, and being taken out by dad, being held by ped, then passed back to dad. Not a whimper. Dad placed her in my arms, ear splitting screams within 3 seconds. Dad picked her up, instant quiet. Three or four times.

I was heartbroken, my daughter hated me and I didn't know why. Had I let that hurt my feelings or become bitter about it I'm sure I could have convinced everyone she rejected me. She started liking me again within a few weeks.

12 years later I realized why she did that. She wanted to nurse and I didn't get the cue. I could have ruined our relationship forever if I had allowed myself to believe she rejected me in infancy. I'm sure I would have reacted with coldness or maybe cruelty. That would have bred and grown over the years to taint every aspect of our relationship.

Sometimes I think I had less knowledge but way more common sense when I was younger.

Hankster I'm sorry your mother misread your 2-week-old involuntary head flop as rejection, and that you took all the blame for it your whole life. Her perspective was skewed.

*my perspective also skewed, sorry Stopdog!

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Thanks but the head flop story belongs to Hankster I think, or someone else.

Wow I must be high! Sorry.

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i have two kids.

i've always noticed with my two that they go in stages and they have preferences. my oldest one preferred my husband and still does. i don't think of him as rejecting me as opposed to simply preferring someone else. he also liked to be held a lot.

my second one (now a year old), doesn't enjoy being held as much but i'm the preferred parent usually. if i try to rock him he screams at me until i put him in his crib. i don't think he's rejecting me, i think he wants to go to sleep and my insistence on touching him is hindering that.

babies have personalities and desires. i've never given it much thought past that.

I think parents that look for and try to follow their babies cues are a lot less likely to end up abusing them. There may be exceptions but most abusive people in my life were too selfish to bend themselves to another's will.

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I am at the older end of the age scale of posters. My upbringing was not unusual for the time. Babies/children were supposed to bend to the will of parents - it was not an usual concept of the time. The problem with me was that it seems sometimes I did not go along with it of my own accord.

+1, my parents had me in their "golden years" and raised me the way they knew. It wasn't necessarily wrong just missing some tiny technical details, like showing affection and raising us to be whole people who could survive outside their nest. That's why I'm 40 and have no spine, no opinion, and no idea how to "grow up" after all these years. We didn't need opinions, our parents told us what to think and how to feel, and outspoken-ness was discouraged with corporal punishment. I'm a child of the seventies, my father was a child of the great depression.

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This is exactly the case with my husband, who's older than I- in his mid 50s. Having a child now, he is nearly two generations separated from what young parents consider the normal, enlightened way to parent.

Even my therapist, who was trained in the 90s, is a little out of touch with how a lot of parenting was done in the 50s and 60s. It wasn't all Leave it to Beaver.

That is where nature v. nurture comes in too. Some people respond to the whims of parents one way and others respond in a different way. That is why I don't see how my mother was wrong either.

Your infant-self wouldn't have noticed her rebuff, but as it was her nature to rebuff you repeatedly, it gradually came to you, something must be wrong with me, mom doesn't like me. Why do we take the blame for them so willingly?

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I don't think in my case, that I do.
I was not abused by my parents like many people have been by theirs. Mine were fairly ordinary. I do keep telling the therapists that too.

I'm not saying you were abused, nor was I, just that parents were capable of misconceptions in their day just as we are now. The collective "we" as children internalize and take blame from where it belongs and heap it upon ourselves, thus growing up believing we are flawed, unworthy, even unlovable. My question was broad, why do kids too young to know better automatically take the blame for the faults of adults?

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It is too scary for a child to imagine that a parent would hurt them or react unpredictably without cause. So they blame themselves because it gives them a sense of control. Also, at young ages, the world revolves around children in their minds. Anything that happens is because of them in some way, whether good or bad.

Because as a dependent child, it's safer to believe there is something wrong with you than the person you need to keep you alive.

I'm not sure how anyone would really know how they were as an infant or how their parents were for that matter. Memory isn't simple and shifts. It is rare that anyone has pre-verbal memory that is explicit.

Still there are ways to infer things from adult behavior, and that includes also responses to tests that assess this type of thing. An avoidant attachment looks on the outside like the child is rejecting. However, the child actually registers distress on monitors. And even though avoidant it is still an attachment. I don't think there is such a thing as someone who does not have any type of attachment. Like people have said, infants are hard-wired to seek connection; it is a part of the survival of the species. And I believe that research shows that even if there are some differences, it is cross-cultural and hence universal. But it's not all nature necessarily. The infant's attachment style can be predicted, not only by very early observations, but actually by attachment tests that are done during pregnancy before the child is even born. That means that the mother may pass her own attachment style onto her infant or in some way cause the infant to develop a particular attachment style in response to hers. None of this is conscious, not even the behavioral interplay. And it is so overdetermined by factors that I'm not sure what exactly could be said for sure.