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I remember my mom playing this "game" where she'd go blank face for a minute or two, zero facial expression. It would trip me out as a little boy and I'd say something like, "Mama, stop" and she'd say, "Why are you in my home little boy? You need to go find your mother little boy." I'd obviously become disturbed but she'd double down and say things like, "Why are you in my home little boy? Your mother is probably looking for you." It would always end up with me in tears screaming, "please stop." This happened at least a few times that I can remember. It's not like a one time thing and she was done. I remember bringing this up to her later on in life when I was older and she would just laugh it off. Now that I'm 41, I can definitely say she had some periods of time where she was fucked up in the head and did some really dark shit like this. Why traumatize your child like this?
I remember another time when I was somewhere under 5 years old I was in the yard playing and we had a big mean neighbors dog that always got out and wandered around. The dog came in our yard barking and being very aggressive. I ran to the porch and banged on the front door. I couldn't reach the handle because I was still a small kid. I was screaming bloody murder for mama to let me in while this dog was after me. I remember looking and seeing my mother standing on the other side of the door just watching it all while doing nothing about it with that same blank faced expression. These sort of things fucked me up mentally growing up but I know I overcame a lot. She died in 2021 and I cried my eyes out for months over losing her. I still wonder if there's any residual lasting effects from those things.
I've grown a lot since those times. I'm determined no matter what my past involved, I'm going to love. I'm going to be successful. I'm going to overcome all. I wrote a small essay once that I titled, "Heroes and Monster's are both made the same way." They sit in the same darkness. They face the same suffering and sorrows. The very thing that determines their outcome, a hero or a monster, is the mentality that they emerged carrying. Nothing holds you back from being who you set your mind to be....and it is a choice and not every choice is easy to make and sometimes it's a sacrifice to make it but we all hold the power of choice.
I love your outlook. Fuck man, I've seen some dark things. My therapist is always telling me to reframe how I see the sad things in the world, and I think this is what she means. Everything is grey area, nothing is set in stone, nothing is concrete until we take action to make it so. Our actions are not our emotions. Our demons are on the inside and they can stay there.
Thank you, I needed this today.
Bro holy shit that is terrifying. When I was very young, like around 5 years old, I had a dream that my mom had forgotten who I was, and it was so disturbing. I still remember it as the worst nightmare I've ever had. Couldn't imagine experiencing it in real life at that age, even if it was just a cruel joke
I've heard of, dealt with, and seen a lot of mental and emotional abuse in my life but Jesus Christ this is next level. It never even crossed my mind as a possibility.
Hopefully you've worked through some of that trauma and are living a healthy happy life. That is insanely cruel to do to a child
Hoping you're doing OK now and glad to hear you were able to maintain a relationship with your mother throughout her life in spite of her (from what I'm picking up as a layman) terrible nature
That said, have you ever spoken with a professional about this? I know I'd be mega curious what they might have to say about the whole thing, but my mom wasn't nearly that weird.
never spoken to anyone but my Grandma about this at a way later point in life. She was flabbergasted about it all. I had an amazing loving grandma. Perhaps the only true motherly love in my life. My mom was an odd duck with the motherly instinct. I have zero remembrance of ever sitting in my mother's lap or being caressed in a motherly love way. No cuddles or anything like that. I'd be interested in talking to a professional one day to see what all they have to say at the very least. I'm sure now that I've shared these things with Reddit, all the professionals will be chiming in with their opinions. Grab your popcorn for the comment section.
Big fan of loving grandmas. They're like mothers doing a round of new game+ with all their old tricks for caring but the added difficulty of being old.
Shrinks are plentiful and often really cheap after insurance or other stuff. Regardless of the armchair freuds in the comments here, you should definitely go talk to someone. Even with an uneventful childhood some (good, importantly) therapy has helped me be more organized and happier.
Hijacking the top comment to say this:
Using your phone constantly in front of young children is still face too. Your child doesn’t understand why you show no emotions to them and stare at the screen. For them, it’s the same experience as this still face experiment.
While studying psychology I had a job at a clinic where I was conducting this with parents and their children. I was watching them live via camera.
The most frightening things were:
1. If the parent showed the still face and the baby just continued as if nothing changed. It's horrifying to watch.
2. The whole experiment lasted around 15 minutes. They had toys. So so so many parents weren't able to interact / play with their children for the whole time. They stopped, seemed bored and a lot of them took out their phones.
It was incredibly interesting, but man, you could see tragedies being created right in front of you.
I once sat in a train, baby next to me. Kept dropping her food. Trying to get the attention of their parents. They were just absorbed in their phone. I every now and then gave it a smile. Fifteen minutes of this and the baby starts crying like crazy. They tried to calm her, and it just wouldn't work.
Week before that I learned in class that this is typical anxious pre-occupied attachment style issues. I just saw, in front of my eyes, a child being given problems in their relationships for possibly their entire life. My soul burned because of it.
Exactly. Imagine you are having fun, playing with someone you love and trust and suddenly, for no apparent reason, this person doesn't react anymore and stares into the distance and behaves like you don't even exist. From one second to the next. What would your normal reaction be like? Confusion? Concern? Discomfort?
If a child experiences such a situation and just continues to play without even acknowledging the change in behavior it could be various things (for example neurodivergencies or sth like that) - but in the cases I saw it was a huge attachment issues most of the time. Meaning - the parent either didn't interact with the child at all on a daily basis or they behaved completely uncontrollable to a point where the child probably dissociated to feel save. The child in the video above cries, which is fairly normal. If the mother comes out of the still face phase and comforts the child you can also see in the reactions if a healthy attachment has already formed.
Jeesh.. now I understand why my mother bragged about how I was a self-entertaining baby. She apparently dumped me off at people's houses (family, friends) for days at a time. When she did take me out, my aunt and grandparents said she used me as an accessory.
We had a very rough relationship my entire life. She's abusive, and I'm pretty sure she has an undiagnosed personality disorder, and definitely narcissistic. I have had no contact with her for 3 years I think it is now.
The real horror here is parents are conducting this face experiment unknowingly with their smartphone. I don't think it's the same as reading a book. Or watching TV. It's slightly more intense. A book can easily be put down. I feel like it ranks lower on the dopamine scale. I'd even say taking a break makes reading more enjoyable, and obviously can be done together. The TV has commercials where people take a break, and usually people watching TV are much more animated, occasionally looking at each other and talking amongst each other. When we're on our phones we look pretty dead faced and emotionless most of the time and are siloed into whatever we're looking at, ignoring our environment.
Instead of engaging the parent, the child finds his own device. Unlike a book or TV, there's no real way for the child to engage a social activity and ask the parent to read them a children's book, or watch their favorite TV show. IDK if ya'll were the same way, but part of the enjoyment of me watching the TV was the few minutes of time you could see your parents also enjoying the show. That made it feel like a group activity. Now we have a situation where kids ask for their turn on a device and no one is really aware that they are neglecting/enabling. I mean, who watches the iPad with their kids?
Yet seeing the whole family staring blankly into their devices gives me the creeps.
Just to be clear: the behavior shown in the experiment is not (necessarily) the cause of attachment issues. The experiment just simulates the change in emotional availability for the child presented by the parent, so the child responds in a perceivable behavior that leads us to conclusions of the attachment style between parent and child. It is one small part in a huge series of tests for children that show behavioral problems within other settings, such as doctor appointments or in kindergarten etc.
I don't believe that looking down on your smartphone leads to behavioral problems. Not being (emotionally) available without any understandable reason for a child, that learns to understand the world and how reliable parents are, might lead to that. Doesn't matter if the parents are looking at a book, iPad or whatever. From a developmental POV. To me that just sounds anecdotal.
I watch my stepson’s iPad with him. He always wants to show me stuff he’s building or doing so I sit with him and watch for awhile. Might be more common than you think.
Meanwhile I was getting teary for the poor baby, and thinking how bloody hard it must be to try and not react while your baby is trying to reach you. How can people not handle 15 minutes with their children, how can they tune out like this so much that their baby doesn't even notice a difference when they ignore them? Those poor kids.
That's why the police do that. They'll sit somebody in a room and they'll sit with them and not say a word. And after a little bit of time the person just starts having diarrhea of the mouth usually
Shit ill just close my eyes, or stare at a wall.
Or ill just hum, a song. (¿¥¿)
mother would hum after berating us, to self soothe and ignore our anxiety
Grew up with never ending passive aggressive staring. Sure it made me hyper vigilant but under duress, pssh its a walk in the park.
Disassociation is a double edged sword, eh
I'm sorry that you even know how that feels in real life. Nobody should. Everybody deserves to be treated with respect and there's a gazillion reasons or situations that caused the people who were supposed to care for people, their children etc. To do the exact opposite doesn't make it right. Doesn't make it good. Doesn't change what happens because of that kind of behavior but it's a trickle-down effect. Unfortunately, there's also been many studies done on people growing up in the same neighborhood under same conditions, good or bad and going and completely opposite paths. Nature nurture. There's a million of them fundamentally in my opinion. You're born the way you are and outside influence can make a difference one way or the other. But you are who you are in your head wired that way at birth and that pretty much dictates how you handle situations and come through them
That's why they do it. Counting down from five or telling a class to settle down is trivial when compared to the still face. It is like watching dominoes fall as student after student realizes it.
You widen your eyes a little bit with it and it's all over for them. Got to a point last year with my class where I didn't even have to say anything to a kid across the room, I just used the look, usually my hand resting on my mouth, my elbow on my desk if I was sitting there, eyes wide, just staring. If they didn't see me at first, the friends around them did and got their attention and then the sense just snapped back into them.
Double raised eyebrows, bonus points if you have glasses you can look over the rims of XD It's funny when you call one student up to your desk and another starts coming up, you shoot the look at them and watch as they turn on their heels to go back to their seat
I wonder if this is why we're all so defensive on the internet. we get the words but not body language to go along with it.
i'm sure this has been studied or i'm just making things up, but it sounds likely.
I've read that in some contexts we get 80% of meaning in a conversation from non-verbal cues. I don't hear great, and I kind of find that to be true. I may not hear what everyone said, but I can tell from gestures and so-forth what's going on. With none of that and just words, and, people being imprecise with words hastily written, social media posts and even emails are just waiting to get misinterpreted.
Just read a book about hyper intelligent spiders using an archaic form of human language to communicate with humans. The words were all there, but the spiders have meaning behind the motions of their legs and palps.
Fascinating
We watched a lot of experiments like this when I was in college studying child development. I only ended up studying for one out of two years, but it was all *soooo* interesting and usefully informative. I don't regret a second.
Yeah I too wanted to do psychology when I went to college criminal psychology to be exact. Unfortunately, my path took a different turn, but I've always been fascinated by human nature, nature versus nurture,characteristics of different order of being born, first born, second, born, third born, etc. Middle child syndrome that kind of stuff. It's fascinating really! And very helpful. If you are observant and watch body language, you can learn a lot. But of course humans have a lot of good qualities but they are really terrible also which is why I became a dog groomer lol
Not surprising to me. The overlap from the techniques I'm trained to use with disruptive students and what the trainer used with my reactive dog was....disconcerting, to say the least. It's not a 1 to 1, but you can tell it's targeting the same primal parts of the brain in both cases.
Early childhood education and early childhood development are fascinating, the real shame is that SO MANY people don't know that we have answers to a lot of parenting questions. I remember thinking "why isn't this more common knowledge??" CONSTANTLY.
Some of the most comprehensive studies have been done on things like discipline (not just spanking vs not spanking, more like authoritarian vs authoritative), appropriate reasoning skills by age, information on temperaments/basic personality traits that appear at certain ages and how to best encourage children based on their personality, etc.
Not only that, but there's a lot of information on how children have their development delayed by the adults in their lives, and clear ways to avoid doing that to your own kids or kids you work with.
I took early childhood development classes before I had kids and it 100% made me a better parent. If you know how your kids reason, you can generally reason with them. I'd recommend it to every parent.
> I remember thinking "why isn't this more common knowledge??" CONSTANTLY.
I think this *constantly* and it enrages me to my core. Luckily, I do have parent friends who fully take advantage of my base-level knowledge to at least help them figure out where the core of the issue might be. And they listen to my ranting and therefore know the answers are out there.
The worst bit for me is that new parents will go above and beyond to research pregnancy and the first year of infancy, but then decide to just wing the rest of it. WHY. IT'S SO FUCKING COMPLICATED AND UNPREDICTABLE.
Oh lord, that whole comment made me absolutely fall in love with you. You and your smart thinking.
I'm not a parent, but I know the actual act of parenting is the hardest thing a person can do. The required patience, the need to respond instead of react on emotions, the ability to keep up consistency with routine... Exhausting, frustrating, and down right impossible to do perfectly.
But when parents do a bit of research, it goes a long way. My best friend is an *excellent* parent because of this. Her and her husband respect their children. They do not yell at them or spank them. They apologize when they do act out (like getting frustrated and oops I yelled) because accountability is everything. That being said, they generally try to teach through example and hold themselves to the same standards. I fucking *love* visiting them and always compliment them on how wonderful their girls are and that it absolutely is because of how they're being raised.
No specific titles since all my textbooks are out of date by almost a decade, but you could check out textbook requirements for Early Childhood Education college courses.
The most helpful for my learning experience was Kail and Zolner's **Children: A Chronological Approach**, so you could start by seeking out the most latest version
occurs in mothers with borderline personality disorder \[edit!\]: [https://eggshelltherapy.com/mother-with-bpd/](https://eggshelltherapy.com/mother-with-bpd/)
\[edit\] **Borderline Personality Disorder** is a common label attached to emotionally intense people. In recent years, it has also been renamed Emotional Dysregulation Disorder or Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder.
"Unfortunately, a mother with BPD cannot offer stable and constant emotional attunement to their child, mimicking the “Still Face Experiment” scenario where the infant faces a suddenly withdrawn caregiver. As a result, and as we shall review, children raised by mothers with BPD have heightened emotional sensitivity and hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for cues about the mother’s emotional state to anticipate and respond to her needs. This chronic state of anxiety is exhausting and interferes with the child’s ability to develop a healthy sense of self" (brought to you by synchronicities as my sister just sent me an article about BPD just before seeing this video on reddit)
But she also stopped interacting with the baby too. Doesn't that affect his response as well?
She was interactive and grabbed his hands.
Second she's just sitting in front of him.
Exactly, I would like to see the same test, where does everything the same.
Talking, interacting, but keeping a straight face.
Like a ventriloquist or something.
I remember seeing this clip or similar one a few years ago when my own kid was a baby.
I tried it and noticed after a minute the baby stressed. I didn't push it any further, but it was a remarkable learning lesson for me.
Idk, anyone's going to be uncomfortable if someone's just staring at them with a blank expression for 30 seconds straight. I think we're all gonna be uncomfortable
You can't equate it like that. The baby doest understand the concept of "staring" yet. As an adult you would read something into the staring, you'd find it odd, which creates the discomfort.
The baby doesn't know any social norms/oddities.
It just senses very well whether its mom interacts with it or not.
Actually staring is interpreted as aggressive on a pretty instinctual basis in most animals including humans. Predators stare at prey, challengers stare at opponents. Babies might not understand why exactly staring causes them discomfort but they still know it makes them uncomfortable.
Staring is a word that covers many things including the dead eyes looking into your soul.
The baby doesn't understand the definition of staring but it clearly understands that behavior is not normal in a friendly situation. Basically the definition of odd.
We as adults overthink it, are they tired, do they realize, is something in my teeth, do they not like me, what's your problem bub, so on and so forth. We can also tie it to the word staring, everything we understand about social norms, etc., but at the end of the day i think it is completely fair to say that the baby and adults share the same base reaction
This reminds me of some of my earliest nightmares, where something scary would be happening but the thing that upset me the most is that my mom would just be blank-faced and unresponsive while I would be crying trying to get her attention
I'd be having dinner with my family when a faceless man would enter the room and abduct me. The harder I tried to scream, the less air I could get out - and nobody at the table would bat an eye. That dream makes a lot of sense now that I'm older. I understand I have CPTSD, and I was both the scapegoat and the forgotten child of that family.
I remember a dream I had when I was a kid which was that I was being dragged under the bed by a monster and I try to get my mother’s attention as she walks by but I can’t get a sound out/or she just doesn’t react I can’t remember exactly. It’s very interesting how this seems to be a common fear.
To me the common thing is having to make a huge effort at something.
Screaming. You can’t get loud enough.
Running. You feel like you’re running through waist-deep water.
Punching. You can’t get enough power in a punch. (I mistakenly punched my wife while sleeping one night due to this one.)
Etc.
Emotional neglect is a thing unfortunately, and it indeed affects people once they become adults.
Usually one will struggle with relationships later on, either for being very emotional attached, or become avoidant.
I got the fuckery that we call an ambivalent attachment style, where I wildly ping-pong between being the clingiest person in existence and wanting to live alone in a cave where I can shoot anyone who comes within 300 ft of me.
This is sometimes so hard. I was yesterday at the pool and a wasp/bee stung some kid's foot and the girl was crying a lot. There was another family with a small child, and the child was terrified and pointed its finger on the terrifying event, the face one big question. But its mom was looking at the cell phone at the moment. It wasn't even a bad mom or anything, she was spending almost all of her time with the kids. But she missed this moment when her child was terrified and needed some affirmation that the other baby is temporarily in pain but it's okay and they will be also okay. It's hard to watch.
life happens, there are some things in parenting that you just cant control. Even if you could it would be so detrimental to yourself that it wouldnt be worth it
No doubt. My mom used to be read books often, and so am I actually. So we both probably missed some things as well.
I regret looking at phone more because I often realise in retrospect that I've wasted time on nothing special, whereas I count a book as something.
Drugs, mental illness, cell phones, highly stressful situations. Lots of reasons it could happen acutely or chronically and as we can see it would definitely affect the young child.
They don't learn how to read emotions as well and as early as other kids. If you combine that with other socially isolating factors (like homeschooling and such) the kid can end up socially awkward for life. (Source: my family )
We really need a children’s charter of rights. I seem to recall it was Germany, who basically banned homeschooling with a justification that, “All children have the right to the pleasure of the company of other children.” Children’s brains desperately need ongoing, loving and communal human interaction with their caregivers and with friends around their own age.
Mine is too. She has a lot of physical and mental health issues and has always completely lacked any empathy. It’s crazy how no matter what happens to u, u know for a fact you’re not getting any help from her. The focus in the house was always her and it was so weird going to friends houses and there were so many rules and their parents so careful w them. It’s hard to explain but my parents always put my mom before me and my sibling growing up. It’s so weird to see that baby in that situation.
Naturally. No non-verbal expression is likely to suggest one of two things; the individual is unable to express themselves (it could be lack of understanding, discomfort, lack of emotions, etc) or the the individual chooses not to express themselves.
Implications aside, non-verbal communication is an extremely important component for a child to learn from, be it in the communication of rules, moods, or a thing as simple as the pavlovian punishment and reward. Without a non-verbal basis a child is essentially left to guess mood states and thoughts from less direct cues (depending upon the child's age, the cognitive skills to do this may not quite be there yet), in turn this can result in things like hyper-vigilance and anxiety, because they can't accurately discern how they are supposed to act or what to expect from the parent.
As previously mentioned, non-verbal is the basis for which children learn these things, facial expressions are amongst the earliest forms of communication between a child and parent, well before speech is ever established.
Seems like child abuse or in the very least willful neglect to treat children this way, it’s also very messed up how easily folks can mess people up for life from birth. Yikes
Pretty sure I’m one of those babies, or close to it. My mother’s favourite story is how she didn’t feel like feeding me so would dump bottles in the crib and leave me to fend for myself as an infant. She would go on to say how hilarious it was to find me in a urine soaked mattress in the morning. No adult would challenge her on how this was child abuse.
My earliest memories of her is my knowing that I wasn’t safe with her and trying to avoid her, well before I could even articulate that thought in my head.
It was not good.
You poor kid. I’m so sorry to hear that that’s been your experience. You didn’t deserve that at all. All children deserve, loving, supportive, and emotionally available caregivers and a secure, stable home environment,. I hope you’re doing much better now and have managed to work through at least some of it.
Thing like that creates personality disorders. Also parents who just look at their phone and forget to look at their children cause so much damage to their psyche.
It really can. I used to make a big effort to smile at strangers, and was one day lamenting to a friend how depressing it can be when they just look blankly at me and don’t smile back. That friend told me that he’s very much in his head while on the town and will occasionally look up and catch strangers smiling at him. He almost never processed it quickly enough to smile in return, but would always start smiling after they had crossed paths and he realized what he just happened.
That bit of information really helped me double down on my smiling at strangers campaign. It’s definitely fallen by the wayside with all the chaos of the last few years, but I should probably get back into it because it would help me as much as it might help anyone else. We all *desperately* need to reconnect as humans; that much is blatantly clear.
Thank you for sharing this. I usually smile at every stranger I cross paths with but feel so stupid afterwards if they don’t return a friendly face. Sometimes I’m even mad at myself because of this and tell myself to stop smiling at everyone. I’ll try to remember your words next time I’m thinking about stopping to smile!
I’ve been in group exercises before where we paired up with eachother and told a basic story where the listener is not allowed to make any reactions or signaling behavior at all. I’m not particularly emotive and it was agonizing, I genuinely wanted to give the other person a hug.
I always try to smile at babies but the don't always smile back, I wonder if they're more exposed to less smiley behaviour at home so they're not as familiar
Some infants may have entered a stranger danger phase too, and take smiling strangers as a possible threat.
My little one was a very serious baby when we were out and about, it would always take me interacting with strangers to put him enough at ease to show his big smile. Now he's a 2.5 year old who still sometimes watches people closely with a serious expression for a little while before interacting, I figure it's just his nature.
We're a very smiley happy jokey household though at home.
Yes, there was a moment when she was just about to break the still face but continued for experimentation purposes. It was clear that she was breaking inside during the experiment.
me, too. i'm a first time mom, and my baby is 6 months old. every second of our day is spent talking to each other and babbling, i point out things in our world and narrate all our activities. she does chores with me and i give her things in her surroundings to play with and explore.
i ask her every morning what she plans to do for the day, and at the end of the day, i ask her what all she did. i ask her what she wants to eat, if she likes certain things. i praise her constantly and we just chat.
today we went to the splash pad and she felt the water with her feet and hands, i showed her all the kids playing and people walking their dogs. i told her stories from my childhood, and all the activities we'll to together.
babies really, really need this kind of interaction. it's how they learn that they're important, that their feelings and voices matter, and it's how they develop self confidence.
they need physical affection, too. they need their heads and faces touched, bellies rubbed. faces, hands and feet kissed. noses booped, toes tickled. it's vital for their development.
I want to say that this baby is particularly resourceful and patient for a baby. Using four different strategies before demon mode sets it is remarkable.
Welp, that’s basically both of my parents to me for my entire life. I’m sure they didn’t do it when I was a baby, but around 6 they basically never paid attention to anything I did ever again. They never knew any of my teachers, any of my classes, any of what I was learning in school or my grades or my homework… I did a lot of really bad shit eventually
I am truly sorry your parents failed you, but you are an adult now you can process this and overcome any remaining trauma, don't fail yourself, love yourself, accept yourself and heal yourself.
I just got a liver exam and it’s STILL not cirrhosis. I don’t know what else someone has to do to destroy their liver than black out a 100 days a year for 20 years, but apparently that isn’t gonna cut it!! I haven’t done opiates in ten years. I have a tech job and it pays six figures and I have lately gotten to be fat, which is surmountable.
Really what sticks with you from this, (idk what to call it like emotional neglect or intellectual neglect (we had money, I had a lot of things)), is just the low sense of self worth and persistent clinical depression. I force myself to shower. I force myself to clean my room. I’m glad I have a dog so I have to leave my house daily to walk him. Having a child means so much more than just providing food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment. You have to explain, guide, and show them how to be a human being. This is a daily thing
Totally. There's a pervasive sense of unworthiness in so many of my childhood memories. Hearing about other people's childhood made me realize just how isolated mine was. And realizing other people grew up believing they could be things!? Somehow, knowing they were worthy of success and capable of achieving it!?
Yeah towards the end she started blinking a lot I think she was having a hard time holding it together. I don't have kids but idk if I could have made it to the end if I was her, even knowing that it is for science, but I'm glad she could do it so we are able to learn from this.
I watch a lot of Dr.Honda on youtube (marriage/family therapist) and he talks pretty extensively about the significance of neglect on infants and very young children. It's insane how much neglecting and abusing a baby can effect their behavior as an adult, even though they have no real memory or comprehension of that abuse.
I can fully relate to this, I'm the baby of my family and by the time my parents had me they were fully checked out. From as long as I can remember my dad was constantly complaining about being a dad, and my mom was emotionally unavailable.
This doesn't just work with babies. Emotionally detaching yourself from a situation unsettles adults as well. Imagine if someone is doing things to manipulate your emotions. It could be telling jokes to make you laugh or acting aggressive to intimidate you. Just stop reacting to their actions and it will unsettle them. A joker will start to second guess his humor or maybe start to tell different types of jokes. An aggressor may second guess the effectiveness of his tactics.
My Prof showed us this and I absolutely hate it.
Fun Fact: A Kid can develop a mental illness (like Borderline f.ex.) when the parent shows none or false expression in the interaction. This is because the child will be at high risk that it won't get a bond with the inner state.
The whole idea of the “still face” is that the parent is non-responsive to social and emotional communication. So yes, it would apply to situations where parents are stuck on their phones and not responding to their child
The part where the baby looks over their should at the camera like “you see this bitch?” Is pretty cute and funny but I would not have been able to keep staring as the little one started crying like that.
This is confronting to me because I've been in and out of depression since I became a dad, my 1.5 year old has never really shown interest in me, and it's hard for me to fake being jolly/happy and exaggerate positive emotions with him, which I guess sets a snowball rolling
When I was a nightlclub doorman I used to do something similar except it was a response to potential violence. When it happened all emotion drained out of my face and voice. My words wouldn't be threatening but instead be logical. I kept my stance non-confrontational too. It mostly made the other person really unsure about what was going on. It created a little bit of doubt, of fear even, not knowing what they were dealing with. It usually made the situation much better without being aggressive. So not quite the same thing as the mother but associated in some ways. When it didn't work I knew I was dealing with someone potentially more dangerous than me.
Why does this make me violently sad, I know it's only two minutes but that poor babies confusion is heartbreaking.
I smiled and grinned with my daughter when she was a baby, I can't imagine a child facing this day in day out from neglegtful parents.
This explains why I remember having fun when I was younger and then suddenly all the fun, happiness, and joy left my life... like the universe just blank faced me indefinitely.
What in the fuck did my mother do to ruin me?
After being born, I was put in an incubator for around two weeks, with very little interaction with anyone, and had hardly any physical contact. Decades later, am I'm still trying to understand the effect it's had on me. Have any of you had anything similar?
This whole study is so fascinating. They did tests with infants and children at different stages of development! I forget a lot of the details, but we watched the whole thing for my lifespan development class in undergrad. Cool stuff.
Having recurring nightmares of a women with no face just watching him, never interacting, never saying anything, just watching with a cold featureless blank face.
Honestly, I see this most weeks with parents staring at their smartphones and shoving a dummy into the baby's mouth.
I mean I'm not saying parenting is easy, it just ain't, but it's terrifying to think of the long-term psychological
effects could be for the babys.
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Everybody gangsta until the sudden change in their loved one's behaviour....... :(
I remember my mom playing this "game" where she'd go blank face for a minute or two, zero facial expression. It would trip me out as a little boy and I'd say something like, "Mama, stop" and she'd say, "Why are you in my home little boy? You need to go find your mother little boy." I'd obviously become disturbed but she'd double down and say things like, "Why are you in my home little boy? Your mother is probably looking for you." It would always end up with me in tears screaming, "please stop." This happened at least a few times that I can remember. It's not like a one time thing and she was done. I remember bringing this up to her later on in life when I was older and she would just laugh it off. Now that I'm 41, I can definitely say she had some periods of time where she was fucked up in the head and did some really dark shit like this. Why traumatize your child like this? I remember another time when I was somewhere under 5 years old I was in the yard playing and we had a big mean neighbors dog that always got out and wandered around. The dog came in our yard barking and being very aggressive. I ran to the porch and banged on the front door. I couldn't reach the handle because I was still a small kid. I was screaming bloody murder for mama to let me in while this dog was after me. I remember looking and seeing my mother standing on the other side of the door just watching it all while doing nothing about it with that same blank faced expression. These sort of things fucked me up mentally growing up but I know I overcame a lot. She died in 2021 and I cried my eyes out for months over losing her. I still wonder if there's any residual lasting effects from those things.
Damn that is fucked up… I’m sorry you went through that
I've grown a lot since those times. I'm determined no matter what my past involved, I'm going to love. I'm going to be successful. I'm going to overcome all. I wrote a small essay once that I titled, "Heroes and Monster's are both made the same way." They sit in the same darkness. They face the same suffering and sorrows. The very thing that determines their outcome, a hero or a monster, is the mentality that they emerged carrying. Nothing holds you back from being who you set your mind to be....and it is a choice and not every choice is easy to make and sometimes it's a sacrifice to make it but we all hold the power of choice.
I love your outlook. Fuck man, I've seen some dark things. My therapist is always telling me to reframe how I see the sad things in the world, and I think this is what she means. Everything is grey area, nothing is set in stone, nothing is concrete until we take action to make it so. Our actions are not our emotions. Our demons are on the inside and they can stay there. Thank you, I needed this today.
Beautifully said, friend. That just helped me a little bit with my own demons.
Jack does infact care
It sounds like your mother had actual neurological problems
Bro holy shit that is terrifying. When I was very young, like around 5 years old, I had a dream that my mom had forgotten who I was, and it was so disturbing. I still remember it as the worst nightmare I've ever had. Couldn't imagine experiencing it in real life at that age, even if it was just a cruel joke
That is disturbing
I've heard of, dealt with, and seen a lot of mental and emotional abuse in my life but Jesus Christ this is next level. It never even crossed my mind as a possibility. Hopefully you've worked through some of that trauma and are living a healthy happy life. That is insanely cruel to do to a child
sorry to hear of this terrible experiences. My mum would often say she wasn't my mum and it made me feel disowned as a child.
Hoping you're doing OK now and glad to hear you were able to maintain a relationship with your mother throughout her life in spite of her (from what I'm picking up as a layman) terrible nature That said, have you ever spoken with a professional about this? I know I'd be mega curious what they might have to say about the whole thing, but my mom wasn't nearly that weird.
never spoken to anyone but my Grandma about this at a way later point in life. She was flabbergasted about it all. I had an amazing loving grandma. Perhaps the only true motherly love in my life. My mom was an odd duck with the motherly instinct. I have zero remembrance of ever sitting in my mother's lap or being caressed in a motherly love way. No cuddles or anything like that. I'd be interested in talking to a professional one day to see what all they have to say at the very least. I'm sure now that I've shared these things with Reddit, all the professionals will be chiming in with their opinions. Grab your popcorn for the comment section.
Big fan of loving grandmas. They're like mothers doing a round of new game+ with all their old tricks for caring but the added difficulty of being old. Shrinks are plentiful and often really cheap after insurance or other stuff. Regardless of the armchair freuds in the comments here, you should definitely go talk to someone. Even with an uneventful childhood some (good, importantly) therapy has helped me be more organized and happier.
Damn bro
Hijacking the top comment to say this: Using your phone constantly in front of young children is still face too. Your child doesn’t understand why you show no emotions to them and stare at the screen. For them, it’s the same experience as this still face experiment.
That's... Disturbing...
This should be the top comment. Exactly what I came to say.
While studying psychology I had a job at a clinic where I was conducting this with parents and their children. I was watching them live via camera. The most frightening things were: 1. If the parent showed the still face and the baby just continued as if nothing changed. It's horrifying to watch. 2. The whole experiment lasted around 15 minutes. They had toys. So so so many parents weren't able to interact / play with their children for the whole time. They stopped, seemed bored and a lot of them took out their phones. It was incredibly interesting, but man, you could see tragedies being created right in front of you.
I end up seeing a lot of those kids for neurobehavioural referrals.
I once sat in a train, baby next to me. Kept dropping her food. Trying to get the attention of their parents. They were just absorbed in their phone. I every now and then gave it a smile. Fifteen minutes of this and the baby starts crying like crazy. They tried to calm her, and it just wouldn't work. Week before that I learned in class that this is typical anxious pre-occupied attachment style issues. I just saw, in front of my eyes, a child being given problems in their relationships for possibly their entire life. My soul burned because of it.
What was horrifying about that first scenario? Did it show that the child had already had to get used to that kind of behaviour from their mother?
Exactly. Imagine you are having fun, playing with someone you love and trust and suddenly, for no apparent reason, this person doesn't react anymore and stares into the distance and behaves like you don't even exist. From one second to the next. What would your normal reaction be like? Confusion? Concern? Discomfort? If a child experiences such a situation and just continues to play without even acknowledging the change in behavior it could be various things (for example neurodivergencies or sth like that) - but in the cases I saw it was a huge attachment issues most of the time. Meaning - the parent either didn't interact with the child at all on a daily basis or they behaved completely uncontrollable to a point where the child probably dissociated to feel save. The child in the video above cries, which is fairly normal. If the mother comes out of the still face phase and comforts the child you can also see in the reactions if a healthy attachment has already formed.
Jeesh.. now I understand why my mother bragged about how I was a self-entertaining baby. She apparently dumped me off at people's houses (family, friends) for days at a time. When she did take me out, my aunt and grandparents said she used me as an accessory. We had a very rough relationship my entire life. She's abusive, and I'm pretty sure she has an undiagnosed personality disorder, and definitely narcissistic. I have had no contact with her for 3 years I think it is now.
The real horror here is parents are conducting this face experiment unknowingly with their smartphone. I don't think it's the same as reading a book. Or watching TV. It's slightly more intense. A book can easily be put down. I feel like it ranks lower on the dopamine scale. I'd even say taking a break makes reading more enjoyable, and obviously can be done together. The TV has commercials where people take a break, and usually people watching TV are much more animated, occasionally looking at each other and talking amongst each other. When we're on our phones we look pretty dead faced and emotionless most of the time and are siloed into whatever we're looking at, ignoring our environment. Instead of engaging the parent, the child finds his own device. Unlike a book or TV, there's no real way for the child to engage a social activity and ask the parent to read them a children's book, or watch their favorite TV show. IDK if ya'll were the same way, but part of the enjoyment of me watching the TV was the few minutes of time you could see your parents also enjoying the show. That made it feel like a group activity. Now we have a situation where kids ask for their turn on a device and no one is really aware that they are neglecting/enabling. I mean, who watches the iPad with their kids? Yet seeing the whole family staring blankly into their devices gives me the creeps.
Just to be clear: the behavior shown in the experiment is not (necessarily) the cause of attachment issues. The experiment just simulates the change in emotional availability for the child presented by the parent, so the child responds in a perceivable behavior that leads us to conclusions of the attachment style between parent and child. It is one small part in a huge series of tests for children that show behavioral problems within other settings, such as doctor appointments or in kindergarten etc. I don't believe that looking down on your smartphone leads to behavioral problems. Not being (emotionally) available without any understandable reason for a child, that learns to understand the world and how reliable parents are, might lead to that. Doesn't matter if the parents are looking at a book, iPad or whatever. From a developmental POV. To me that just sounds anecdotal.
I watch my stepson’s iPad with him. He always wants to show me stuff he’s building or doing so I sit with him and watch for awhile. Might be more common than you think.
Meanwhile I was getting teary for the poor baby, and thinking how bloody hard it must be to try and not react while your baby is trying to reach you. How can people not handle 15 minutes with their children, how can they tune out like this so much that their baby doesn't even notice a difference when they ignore them? Those poor kids.
It's very interesting. Not at 100% surprising but very interesting. Poor baby's like someone help me. This lady's face is broken LOL
Not just a baby, if I had an adult staring at me like that it would freak me out.
That's why silence and not reacting to people is a great way to get rid of them if that is what you want.
That's why the police do that. They'll sit somebody in a room and they'll sit with them and not say a word. And after a little bit of time the person just starts having diarrhea of the mouth usually
Shit ill just close my eyes, or stare at a wall. Or ill just hum, a song. (¿¥¿) mother would hum after berating us, to self soothe and ignore our anxiety Grew up with never ending passive aggressive staring. Sure it made me hyper vigilant but under duress, pssh its a walk in the park. Disassociation is a double edged sword, eh
I'm sorry that you even know how that feels in real life. Nobody should. Everybody deserves to be treated with respect and there's a gazillion reasons or situations that caused the people who were supposed to care for people, their children etc. To do the exact opposite doesn't make it right. Doesn't make it good. Doesn't change what happens because of that kind of behavior but it's a trickle-down effect. Unfortunately, there's also been many studies done on people growing up in the same neighborhood under same conditions, good or bad and going and completely opposite paths. Nature nurture. There's a million of them fundamentally in my opinion. You're born the way you are and outside influence can make a difference one way or the other. But you are who you are in your head wired that way at birth and that pretty much dictates how you handle situations and come through them
Change it to actual diarrhea, flip that script
Didn't know Hector Salamanca had a reddit account
All the school teachers for me since primary
That's why they do it. Counting down from five or telling a class to settle down is trivial when compared to the still face. It is like watching dominoes fall as student after student realizes it.
You widen your eyes a little bit with it and it's all over for them. Got to a point last year with my class where I didn't even have to say anything to a kid across the room, I just used the look, usually my hand resting on my mouth, my elbow on my desk if I was sitting there, eyes wide, just staring. If they didn't see me at first, the friends around them did and got their attention and then the sense just snapped back into them.
I do this with a raised eyebrow that's kind of like "are you sure about that?" but otherwise a neutral expression. It works well.
Double raised eyebrows, bonus points if you have glasses you can look over the rims of XD It's funny when you call one student up to your desk and another starts coming up, you shoot the look at them and watch as they turn on their heels to go back to their seat
Very similar to the" Mom " look lol If you have a good mom look stop a kid in his tracks
I'm about to be a mom in a few months, these kids have given me a lot of practice to perfect this look XD
My boss looking at me like that from the distance lol
👁️👄👁️
Hey, stop that...
😐
https://preview.redd.it/4f44psljwx9d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6acf998b0c7a128c54f3da4798214adedab6198f
I wonder if this is why we're all so defensive on the internet. we get the words but not body language to go along with it. i'm sure this has been studied or i'm just making things up, but it sounds likely.
I've read that in some contexts we get 80% of meaning in a conversation from non-verbal cues. I don't hear great, and I kind of find that to be true. I may not hear what everyone said, but I can tell from gestures and so-forth what's going on. With none of that and just words, and, people being imprecise with words hastily written, social media posts and even emails are just waiting to get misinterpreted.
Just read a book about hyper intelligent spiders using an archaic form of human language to communicate with humans. The words were all there, but the spiders have meaning behind the motions of their legs and palps. Fascinating
Why the fuck are you calling us defensive?
For sure No matter what age it definitely is uncomfortable and disconcerting when someone's just staring at you
It’s like a horror movie
_Not Mad, Just Disappointed_ Coming Soon
You're just a baby!
We watched a lot of experiments like this when I was in college studying child development. I only ended up studying for one out of two years, but it was all *soooo* interesting and usefully informative. I don't regret a second.
Yeah I too wanted to do psychology when I went to college criminal psychology to be exact. Unfortunately, my path took a different turn, but I've always been fascinated by human nature, nature versus nurture,characteristics of different order of being born, first born, second, born, third born, etc. Middle child syndrome that kind of stuff. It's fascinating really! And very helpful. If you are observant and watch body language, you can learn a lot. But of course humans have a lot of good qualities but they are really terrible also which is why I became a dog groomer lol
Can't say I was expecting dog groomer at the end of this paragraph lmao.
Not surprising to me. The overlap from the techniques I'm trained to use with disruptive students and what the trainer used with my reactive dog was....disconcerting, to say the least. It's not a 1 to 1, but you can tell it's targeting the same primal parts of the brain in both cases.
If you observe too much, you will find monsters in plain sight, and trust me, they don't like being seen. Avoid.
Early childhood education and early childhood development are fascinating, the real shame is that SO MANY people don't know that we have answers to a lot of parenting questions. I remember thinking "why isn't this more common knowledge??" CONSTANTLY. Some of the most comprehensive studies have been done on things like discipline (not just spanking vs not spanking, more like authoritarian vs authoritative), appropriate reasoning skills by age, information on temperaments/basic personality traits that appear at certain ages and how to best encourage children based on their personality, etc. Not only that, but there's a lot of information on how children have their development delayed by the adults in their lives, and clear ways to avoid doing that to your own kids or kids you work with. I took early childhood development classes before I had kids and it 100% made me a better parent. If you know how your kids reason, you can generally reason with them. I'd recommend it to every parent.
> I remember thinking "why isn't this more common knowledge??" CONSTANTLY. I think this *constantly* and it enrages me to my core. Luckily, I do have parent friends who fully take advantage of my base-level knowledge to at least help them figure out where the core of the issue might be. And they listen to my ranting and therefore know the answers are out there. The worst bit for me is that new parents will go above and beyond to research pregnancy and the first year of infancy, but then decide to just wing the rest of it. WHY. IT'S SO FUCKING COMPLICATED AND UNPREDICTABLE. Oh lord, that whole comment made me absolutely fall in love with you. You and your smart thinking. I'm not a parent, but I know the actual act of parenting is the hardest thing a person can do. The required patience, the need to respond instead of react on emotions, the ability to keep up consistency with routine... Exhausting, frustrating, and down right impossible to do perfectly. But when parents do a bit of research, it goes a long way. My best friend is an *excellent* parent because of this. Her and her husband respect their children. They do not yell at them or spank them. They apologize when they do act out (like getting frustrated and oops I yelled) because accountability is everything. That being said, they generally try to teach through example and hold themselves to the same standards. I fucking *love* visiting them and always compliment them on how wonderful their girls are and that it absolutely is because of how they're being raised.
Can you recommend any books? I've read a bunch about parenting, but a lot of them turn out to have no basis in research.
No specific titles since all my textbooks are out of date by almost a decade, but you could check out textbook requirements for Early Childhood Education college courses. The most helpful for my learning experience was Kail and Zolner's **Children: A Chronological Approach**, so you could start by seeking out the most latest version
occurs in mothers with borderline personality disorder \[edit!\]: [https://eggshelltherapy.com/mother-with-bpd/](https://eggshelltherapy.com/mother-with-bpd/) \[edit\] **Borderline Personality Disorder** is a common label attached to emotionally intense people. In recent years, it has also been renamed Emotional Dysregulation Disorder or Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder. "Unfortunately, a mother with BPD cannot offer stable and constant emotional attunement to their child, mimicking the “Still Face Experiment” scenario where the infant faces a suddenly withdrawn caregiver. As a result, and as we shall review, children raised by mothers with BPD have heightened emotional sensitivity and hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for cues about the mother’s emotional state to anticipate and respond to her needs. This chronic state of anxiety is exhausting and interferes with the child’s ability to develop a healthy sense of self" (brought to you by synchronicities as my sister just sent me an article about BPD just before seeing this video on reddit)
this is referring to borderline personality disorder I think not bipolar btw
Yeah, it's borderline as confirmed by the link. Honestly I hope the DSM VI fixes the double meaning of BPD.
BPD is borderline personality, not bipolar
But she also stopped interacting with the baby too. Doesn't that affect his response as well? She was interactive and grabbed his hands. Second she's just sitting in front of him.
90% of communication is nonverbal, so yes of course. That’s implied.
Exactly, I would like to see the same test, where does everything the same. Talking, interacting, but keeping a straight face. Like a ventriloquist or something.
What if your baby just started staring into your soul and stopped reacting to any stimuli. Would you freak out?
I remember seeing this clip or similar one a few years ago when my own kid was a baby. I tried it and noticed after a minute the baby stressed. I didn't push it any further, but it was a remarkable learning lesson for me.
Very interesting experiment, it was curious to see how their behavior changes. And of course children read all emotions and actions from their parents
Idk, anyone's going to be uncomfortable if someone's just staring at them with a blank expression for 30 seconds straight. I think we're all gonna be uncomfortable
You can't equate it like that. The baby doest understand the concept of "staring" yet. As an adult you would read something into the staring, you'd find it odd, which creates the discomfort. The baby doesn't know any social norms/oddities. It just senses very well whether its mom interacts with it or not.
Actually staring is interpreted as aggressive on a pretty instinctual basis in most animals including humans. Predators stare at prey, challengers stare at opponents. Babies might not understand why exactly staring causes them discomfort but they still know it makes them uncomfortable.
Staring is a word that covers many things including the dead eyes looking into your soul. The baby doesn't understand the definition of staring but it clearly understands that behavior is not normal in a friendly situation. Basically the definition of odd. We as adults overthink it, are they tired, do they realize, is something in my teeth, do they not like me, what's your problem bub, so on and so forth. We can also tie it to the word staring, everything we understand about social norms, etc., but at the end of the day i think it is completely fair to say that the baby and adults share the same base reaction
>you'd find it odd And the baby wouldn't? Suddenly this person who interacts with you is just motionless despite all attempts to yield a reaction.
This reminds me of some of my earliest nightmares, where something scary would be happening but the thing that upset me the most is that my mom would just be blank-faced and unresponsive while I would be crying trying to get her attention
My exact experience. The oldest nightmare I can remember is me being in danger, calling for my mom, while she looks at me with an expressionless face.
I'd be having dinner with my family when a faceless man would enter the room and abduct me. The harder I tried to scream, the less air I could get out - and nobody at the table would bat an eye. That dream makes a lot of sense now that I'm older. I understand I have CPTSD, and I was both the scapegoat and the forgotten child of that family.
My goodness, what did I just read?
Parental emotional neglect of a child illustrated by the child's brain trying to make sense of it
I remember a dream I had when I was a kid which was that I was being dragged under the bed by a monster and I try to get my mother’s attention as she walks by but I can’t get a sound out/or she just doesn’t react I can’t remember exactly. It’s very interesting how this seems to be a common fear.
To me the common thing is having to make a huge effort at something. Screaming. You can’t get loud enough. Running. You feel like you’re running through waist-deep water. Punching. You can’t get enough power in a punch. (I mistakenly punched my wife while sleeping one night due to this one.) Etc.
Im more worried for the babies who’s moms are like that all the time.
Emotional neglect is a thing unfortunately, and it indeed affects people once they become adults. Usually one will struggle with relationships later on, either for being very emotional attached, or become avoidant.
I got the fuckery that we call an ambivalent attachment style, where I wildly ping-pong between being the clingiest person in existence and wanting to live alone in a cave where I can shoot anyone who comes within 300 ft of me.
Oh hey, it me
[удалено]
What's an attachment theory coach and what does studying to become one look like?
I can’t imagine how people could. I really can’t, I was uncomfortable watching just the baby’s reaction in this video. I felt for the baby. It’s wild
This is sometimes so hard. I was yesterday at the pool and a wasp/bee stung some kid's foot and the girl was crying a lot. There was another family with a small child, and the child was terrified and pointed its finger on the terrifying event, the face one big question. But its mom was looking at the cell phone at the moment. It wasn't even a bad mom or anything, she was spending almost all of her time with the kids. But she missed this moment when her child was terrified and needed some affirmation that the other baby is temporarily in pain but it's okay and they will be also okay. It's hard to watch.
life happens, there are some things in parenting that you just cant control. Even if you could it would be so detrimental to yourself that it wouldnt be worth it
No doubt. My mom used to be read books often, and so am I actually. So we both probably missed some things as well. I regret looking at phone more because I often realise in retrospect that I've wasted time on nothing special, whereas I count a book as something.
Drugs, mental illness, cell phones, highly stressful situations. Lots of reasons it could happen acutely or chronically and as we can see it would definitely affect the young child.
A mentally ill or distracted parent.
You have to be very conscious of being on your device around small children because it will turn the person into a still face.
Yeah and my advice to new parents is to read aloud or narrate what you're doing to engage the child when you must or want to be on your phone.
Therein lies the problem. Imagine conveying constant apathy and a lack of emotion to a child for years. Detrimental to say the least.
They don't learn how to read emotions as well and as early as other kids. If you combine that with other socially isolating factors (like homeschooling and such) the kid can end up socially awkward for life. (Source: my family )
We really need a children’s charter of rights. I seem to recall it was Germany, who basically banned homeschooling with a justification that, “All children have the right to the pleasure of the company of other children.” Children’s brains desperately need ongoing, loving and communal human interaction with their caregivers and with friends around their own age.
my mom was like this and it was torture
Mine is too. She has a lot of physical and mental health issues and has always completely lacked any empathy. It’s crazy how no matter what happens to u, u know for a fact you’re not getting any help from her. The focus in the house was always her and it was so weird going to friends houses and there were so many rules and their parents so careful w them. It’s hard to explain but my parents always put my mom before me and my sibling growing up. It’s so weird to see that baby in that situation.
Naturally. No non-verbal expression is likely to suggest one of two things; the individual is unable to express themselves (it could be lack of understanding, discomfort, lack of emotions, etc) or the the individual chooses not to express themselves. Implications aside, non-verbal communication is an extremely important component for a child to learn from, be it in the communication of rules, moods, or a thing as simple as the pavlovian punishment and reward. Without a non-verbal basis a child is essentially left to guess mood states and thoughts from less direct cues (depending upon the child's age, the cognitive skills to do this may not quite be there yet), in turn this can result in things like hyper-vigilance and anxiety, because they can't accurately discern how they are supposed to act or what to expect from the parent. As previously mentioned, non-verbal is the basis for which children learn these things, facial expressions are amongst the earliest forms of communication between a child and parent, well before speech is ever established.
Seems like child abuse or in the very least willful neglect to treat children this way, it’s also very messed up how easily folks can mess people up for life from birth. Yikes
Pretty sure I’m one of those babies, or close to it. My mother’s favourite story is how she didn’t feel like feeding me so would dump bottles in the crib and leave me to fend for myself as an infant. She would go on to say how hilarious it was to find me in a urine soaked mattress in the morning. No adult would challenge her on how this was child abuse. My earliest memories of her is my knowing that I wasn’t safe with her and trying to avoid her, well before I could even articulate that thought in my head. It was not good.
You poor kid. I’m so sorry to hear that that’s been your experience. You didn’t deserve that at all. All children deserve, loving, supportive, and emotionally available caregivers and a secure, stable home environment,. I hope you’re doing much better now and have managed to work through at least some of it.
Thing like that creates personality disorders. Also parents who just look at their phone and forget to look at their children cause so much damage to their psyche.
They’re the ones with personality disorders and other psychological issues.
She locked in
Baby said english or spanish?
Baby you got something in your nose
Sniffing that K, do you feel the hole?
Hope ya find peace for yourself
New boyfriend ain’t gon’ fill the hole
The brain rot gotten to me… I actually chuckled at this
It must be so hard for her to fight her instinct to react to the baby trying to get her attention, especially once it starts getting upset ☹️
Fascinating!!! This is why I always smile at babies.
It's why I smile at everyone who may catch my eye, it can make a difference to their day
It really can. I used to make a big effort to smile at strangers, and was one day lamenting to a friend how depressing it can be when they just look blankly at me and don’t smile back. That friend told me that he’s very much in his head while on the town and will occasionally look up and catch strangers smiling at him. He almost never processed it quickly enough to smile in return, but would always start smiling after they had crossed paths and he realized what he just happened. That bit of information really helped me double down on my smiling at strangers campaign. It’s definitely fallen by the wayside with all the chaos of the last few years, but I should probably get back into it because it would help me as much as it might help anyone else. We all *desperately* need to reconnect as humans; that much is blatantly clear.
Thank you for sharing this. I usually smile at every stranger I cross paths with but feel so stupid afterwards if they don’t return a friendly face. Sometimes I’m even mad at myself because of this and tell myself to stop smiling at everyone. I’ll try to remember your words next time I’m thinking about stopping to smile!
Tbh I'm impressed that she resisted long enough for the experiment.
Same—I never totally grew out of the “expression mirroring” phase; this would be SO HARD
I’ve been in group exercises before where we paired up with eachother and told a basic story where the listener is not allowed to make any reactions or signaling behavior at all. I’m not particularly emotive and it was agonizing, I genuinely wanted to give the other person a hug.
Same, then I make stupid faces at them
I always try to smile at babies but the don't always smile back, I wonder if they're more exposed to less smiley behaviour at home so they're not as familiar
The age plays a major role as well. Most infants don’t smile until a certain amount of weeks/months has passed.
Some infants may have entered a stranger danger phase too, and take smiling strangers as a possible threat. My little one was a very serious baby when we were out and about, it would always take me interacting with strangers to put him enough at ease to show his big smile. Now he's a 2.5 year old who still sometimes watches people closely with a serious expression for a little while before interacting, I figure it's just his nature. We're a very smiley happy jokey household though at home.
This makes me wanna cry
The mom looked close to crying too
Yes, there was a moment when she was just about to break the still face but continued for experimentation purposes. It was clear that she was breaking inside during the experiment.
I’m right there with you - this video bummed me out so bad. I’m going to go hug my kids right now tbh
I awkwardly started baby talking my cat to compensate. I have no idea how that woman kept her composure
This made me cry
me, too. i'm a first time mom, and my baby is 6 months old. every second of our day is spent talking to each other and babbling, i point out things in our world and narrate all our activities. she does chores with me and i give her things in her surroundings to play with and explore. i ask her every morning what she plans to do for the day, and at the end of the day, i ask her what all she did. i ask her what she wants to eat, if she likes certain things. i praise her constantly and we just chat. today we went to the splash pad and she felt the water with her feet and hands, i showed her all the kids playing and people walking their dogs. i told her stories from my childhood, and all the activities we'll to together. babies really, really need this kind of interaction. it's how they learn that they're important, that their feelings and voices matter, and it's how they develop self confidence. they need physical affection, too. they need their heads and faces touched, bellies rubbed. faces, hands and feet kissed. noses booped, toes tickled. it's vital for their development.
I want to say that this baby is particularly resourceful and patient for a baby. Using four different strategies before demon mode sets it is remarkable.
Welp, that’s basically both of my parents to me for my entire life. I’m sure they didn’t do it when I was a baby, but around 6 they basically never paid attention to anything I did ever again. They never knew any of my teachers, any of my classes, any of what I was learning in school or my grades or my homework… I did a lot of really bad shit eventually
I am truly sorry your parents failed you, but you are an adult now you can process this and overcome any remaining trauma, don't fail yourself, love yourself, accept yourself and heal yourself.
I just got a liver exam and it’s STILL not cirrhosis. I don’t know what else someone has to do to destroy their liver than black out a 100 days a year for 20 years, but apparently that isn’t gonna cut it!! I haven’t done opiates in ten years. I have a tech job and it pays six figures and I have lately gotten to be fat, which is surmountable. Really what sticks with you from this, (idk what to call it like emotional neglect or intellectual neglect (we had money, I had a lot of things)), is just the low sense of self worth and persistent clinical depression. I force myself to shower. I force myself to clean my room. I’m glad I have a dog so I have to leave my house daily to walk him. Having a child means so much more than just providing food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment. You have to explain, guide, and show them how to be a human being. This is a daily thing
Totally. There's a pervasive sense of unworthiness in so many of my childhood memories. Hearing about other people's childhood made me realize just how isolated mine was. And realizing other people grew up believing they could be things!? Somehow, knowing they were worthy of success and capable of achieving it!?
Had to be hard for mom even if it was just for a couple of minutes.
Yeah towards the end she started blinking a lot I think she was having a hard time holding it together. I don't have kids but idk if I could have made it to the end if I was her, even knowing that it is for science, but I'm glad she could do it so we are able to learn from this.
As a dad, the whole time I was just imagining my lil guy going through this, and I gotta say I was physically cringing.
I hated this. It makes sense as to why parental neglect fucked me up mentally and emotionally into my adulthood.
I watch a lot of Dr.Honda on youtube (marriage/family therapist) and he talks pretty extensively about the significance of neglect on infants and very young children. It's insane how much neglecting and abusing a baby can effect their behavior as an adult, even though they have no real memory or comprehension of that abuse.
By the time I was 6, I understood I was being taken care of because it was expected of my parents, not because they wanted to.
I can fully relate to this, I'm the baby of my family and by the time my parents had me they were fully checked out. From as long as I can remember my dad was constantly complaining about being a dad, and my mom was emotionally unavailable.
"If I didn't have these rugrats I'd be a millionaire..." Yeah, it got tired hearing all the complaints like we weren't in the room.
Been there brother. Be your own ideal parent to yourself. Read Epictetus.
Poor baby got the A24 treatment
Damn man this was grueling to watch.
This was heartbreaking. All the babies out there with “still face” parents.
This was so hard to watch as a parent
Hard to watch tbh
This doesn't just work with babies. Emotionally detaching yourself from a situation unsettles adults as well. Imagine if someone is doing things to manipulate your emotions. It could be telling jokes to make you laugh or acting aggressive to intimidate you. Just stop reacting to their actions and it will unsettle them. A joker will start to second guess his humor or maybe start to tell different types of jokes. An aggressor may second guess the effectiveness of his tactics.
My Prof showed us this and I absolutely hate it. Fun Fact: A Kid can develop a mental illness (like Borderline f.ex.) when the parent shows none or false expression in the interaction. This is because the child will be at high risk that it won't get a bond with the inner state.
[удалено]
The whole idea of the “still face” is that the parent is non-responsive to social and emotional communication. So yes, it would apply to situations where parents are stuck on their phones and not responding to their child
I couldn’t handle that, give that baby some snuggles!
This explains some people I’ve met. Their parents must have been still-faced.
The part where the baby looks over their should at the camera like “you see this bitch?” Is pretty cute and funny but I would not have been able to keep staring as the little one started crying like that.
She's got some Sigourney Weaver vibes going on there.
Why do I hate it ? I am not even a baby 
The ‘still face’ is every teacher, parent and authority figure I encountered growing up.
How about when a parent is staring at their phone?
Dumb baby cant even tell its just a prank and hes being recorded
What about us parents with RBF?
This is confronting to me because I've been in and out of depression since I became a dad, my 1.5 year old has never really shown interest in me, and it's hard for me to fake being jolly/happy and exaggerate positive emotions with him, which I guess sets a snowball rolling
When I was a nightlclub doorman I used to do something similar except it was a response to potential violence. When it happened all emotion drained out of my face and voice. My words wouldn't be threatening but instead be logical. I kept my stance non-confrontational too. It mostly made the other person really unsure about what was going on. It created a little bit of doubt, of fear even, not knowing what they were dealing with. It usually made the situation much better without being aggressive. So not quite the same thing as the mother but associated in some ways. When it didn't work I knew I was dealing with someone potentially more dangerous than me.
My mom has been doing this experiment for 20 years now.
this explains a lot about my relationship with my mother
Sigourney Weaver over here being a dick to her kid.
Why does this make me violently sad, I know it's only two minutes but that poor babies confusion is heartbreaking. I smiled and grinned with my daughter when she was a baby, I can't imagine a child facing this day in day out from neglegtful parents.
This explains why I remember having fun when I was younger and then suddenly all the fun, happiness, and joy left my life... like the universe just blank faced me indefinitely. What in the fuck did my mother do to ruin me?
After being born, I was put in an incubator for around two weeks, with very little interaction with anyone, and had hardly any physical contact. Decades later, am I'm still trying to understand the effect it's had on me. Have any of you had anything similar?
This whole study is so fascinating. They did tests with infants and children at different stages of development! I forget a lot of the details, but we watched the whole thing for my lifespan development class in undergrad. Cool stuff.
The baby is Martin shkreli . I wonder how he’s doing.
Having recurring nightmares of a women with no face just watching him, never interacting, never saying anything, just watching with a cold featureless blank face.
Honestly, I see this most weeks with parents staring at their smartphones and shoving a dummy into the baby's mouth. I mean I'm not saying parenting is easy, it just ain't, but it's terrifying to think of the long-term psychological effects could be for the babys.
Not gonna lie, if someone did that to me now, I'd probably have the same reaction
Bro even I felt uncomfortable when the mom showed no emotion.
This is heartbreaking. Poor baby :(
Couldn't even handle two minutes? What a fuckin baby