Babies explore progressively through movements, speech patterns, physical growth, and cognitive developments. The ‘Babies’ series will show the chronicle of infant-life in six episodes – Love, First Food, Crawling, Sleep, First Word, and First Step – streaming through a one-hour duration each. Throughout the series, you will enjoy the parenting moments of 15 international families. Though the producer tried to show a worldwide scenario, most of the participating families are from the United States and United Kingdom region. In this documentary, families have been chosen from diverse races, which will give the viewers a great opportunity to experience the universal parenting struggles, thrills, and success.
‘Love’, the first episode of this documentary has nicely filmed the first moments when the mothers meet their newborn infants. In the quest of searching the reason for biological bonding between a baby and its parents, scientists have done researches. It is found that the Oxytocin hormone plays a miraculous role in developing emotional bonding between mother and baby during pregnancy and the post-child-birth period. The higher the level of Oxytocin, the stronger the bonding will be between the mother and her baby. The same hormone secretion was found even for fathers too.
The second episode ‘First Food’ highlights the breast-feeding struggles of the mothers combined with fascinating science experiments and extensive academic research across the globe. Did you ever imagine that the mother produces ‘bespoke’ milk for her child? Complying with the specific nutritional needs of individual babies, its birth mother can produce individual milk bespoke by nutrients and hormones. Streaming this documentary you can also learn about the increased amount of mother’s breast-milk production termed as ‘Daughter Effect’ upon human and animal kind. Watch this episode to know many more exciting facts about babies.
The third episode ‘Crawling’ experiments on how a baby starts to crawl on its own. In the mother’s womb, a baby can float freely but it starts to experience gravity since birth. A baby’s physical growth occurs in phases which strengthen its arms and legs. Usually, the head of a baby is bigger than its body. In this backdrop, the ‘Babies’ series focuses on the research on how a baby struggles in moving its body-parts towards forward during the attempt of crawling. Watching this episode, you can experience the real-life expressions and responses of a child while it tries to crawl without being concerned about whether or not it can make it.
Since the babies are born, respective parents wait eagerly to hear their first words. The ‘First Words’ episode highlights how babies enter into the flow of language and curve them up. Babies start expressing their emotions through different noises even before they learn to crawl. It is a miracle how the babies figure it out where the words start and end by capturing the sequence of sound. This episode describes the science how birds and human babies learn to imitate sounds. At the end of the first year of its life, a baby can crack the code of language and starts to speak the language in units. Babies can learn multiple languages in an easier way than adults.
Though Sleep is fundamental for a baby’s development, it is a great challenge to make a baby sleep throughout the night. Streaming the fifth episode ‘Sleep’, you will know some wonderful facts about the sleep of babies. The sleeping patterns of babies are also correlated wither their feeding time. Sleep deprivation of babies also affects their parents. On the screen, you will observe the painstaking effort of the participating mothers in breastfeeding their newborns being deprived of minimal sleep. This episode also shows some ‘sleep’ related researches which found that Babies' sleeping pattern is a combination of cycles including dreaming, waking up, twitching muscles, and going back to sleep again.
The final episode ‘First Step’ is based upon how babies struggle to start walking. This episode connects with some researchers regarding the muscle and bone development of babies which makes them able to walk. This documentary reveals that when babies try to walk, sometimes they fell on the floor. Then they try to stand up again without getting frustrated. It is no less than a miracle how a young human body stands up straight and takes its first step without any support. When a baby learns to walk freely, a new world of discovery gets open in front of it. The babies get pleasure in every step they make.
Overall the ‘Babies’ documentary series is a high-quality production if you can ignore some limitations in camera work. What makes this Netflix series more heart-touching is some real-life research endeavor. Each episode nicely correlates the attitudes of babies with research works – carried out by renowned scientists – in that particular field of study. We hope the ‘Babies’ series will make your quarantine period more enjoyable.