Here's How Your Baby Knows You're Their Mom

The short answer is yes, newborns know their mother at birth. “Research has shown that when newborns are held skin-to-skin by their mothers that there are significant changes in their vital signs — their breathing rates and heart rates slow down as they become calm against their mothers’ bodies, and they are also better able to regulate their body temperatures,” Madden tells Romper. In other words, the baby knows they are being held by their mother right away. But exactly how does a baby know its mother? Again, it’s that combination of senses.

Babies can actually hear their mother’s voice while in utero. “There's evidence that babies begin to recognize their mother's voice as early as the third trimester of pregnancy,” Dr. Rebekah Diamond, M.D., board-certified pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University, tells Romper. “Right after birth, infants seem to recognize their mother's voice and have a preference for her voice over others. They also have a preference for sounds made in the language their mother spoke while pregnant, further showing how much mom's speech has shaped their brain development.” This means that by the time your little one is born, they already know who you are just by the sound of your speaking voice.

A 2012 study published in Acta Paediatrica found that unborn babies actively listen to their mother's voice in the womb, specifically her vowel sounds, during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy. The findings were evidence that the mother has “first dibs on influencing the child's brain," as study researcher Patricia Kuhl put it.

During pregnancy, the baby is exposed to the sound of their mother’s heartbeat, and they can hear this heartbeat from seven months gestation. “Newborn babies are soothed by the sound of heartbeat,” Dr. Pierrette Poinsett, M.D., board-certified pediatrician and medical consultant for the online platform Mom Loves Best, tells Romper.

Exposure to the sound has a substantial impact during utero. “A mother's heartbeat is audible during pregnancy,” explains Diamond. “During the third trimester, the fetal brain has developed enough to be able to recognize that this heartbeat is an important sound. Hearing and responding to the sound of a mother's heartbeat is also important in strengthening further fetal brain development.”

Babies not only recognize their mother's smell — they are calmed by it. “In the NICU I work in,” Madden tells Romper, “we keep small sachets, made in the shape of a heart, that have mothers’ body scents on them in patients’ isolettes (incubators). These sachets help to keep our premature patients calm and connected to their mothers while hospitalized and separated.”

According to Madden, fetuses are continually exposed to the unique smell and taste of their mothers’ amniotic fluid, which contributes to a baby’s highly developed sense of smell at birth. “There are multiple studies that have shown that newborns have a preference for their own mothers’ breast milk and axillary (armpit) body odor within the first week of life compared with others,” she adds. The smell of your skin relaxes your baby and creates a powerful bond, which is why skin-to-skin contact is so important. “Being able to smell, hear, taste, and touch their mothers helps to ease babies’ transition to life outside of the womb, promotes bonding, and can also help babies (and their moms) to catch onto breastfeeding sooner,” Madden explains.

There is some evidence that suggests babies already start preferring their mom’s faces within hours of being born. “Babies are born with fuzzy vision, and can see things clearly only when they are very close to them,” Diamond explains. “This means that the faces they are able to learn and then recognize are from people who hold them the most.” By the time they’re three months old, according to Diamond, babies are “excellent” at distinguishing their mothers’ faces from those of strangers and show a strong preference for them.

Because a baby spends so much time at a close distance to their mom's face, they become somewhat of a facial recognition expert. In fact, 2005 research performed at The University of Sheffield in England found that babies at six months of age were actually better at picking out individual faces among a group than adults were.