Your unborn baby is listening: so what should you do?

My husband and I were in the car when a radio segment came on about babies in China who – after listening to their mothers’ multi-tonal voices and hours of classical music in utero – were apparently more likely to grow into adults with perfect pitch. We looked down at my protruding tummy and wondered what our baby was learning in there: the plotlines to various television dramas? The exact cadence of my voice when I got excited about lunch? For the rest of the journey, we listened to Bach. 

Now, a new study has shown that the aural environment a baby is exposed to in utero really does matter – and that the chattier the mother is, the better. The research, which was carried out in Italy and France, found that “language exposure before birth may help newborns acquire language with ease” after birth – making this some of the strongest evidence we have to date that humans start listening and learning from within the womb.

The reseaurch was done on 33 newborns aged from one to five days old. The babies’ mothers were all native French speakers and the infants were placed in bassinets wearing caps with 10 electrical sensors that monitored their brain activity while they were played recordings of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in French, English and Spanish. 

Their response was markedly pronounced when the story was read in French, showing that the wiring of their brains had been altered by the language they had become accustomed to.

Professor Judit Gervain is one of the lead researchers from Paris Descartes University. “What a mother says is transmitted to babies in utero, even if she just speaks to other people,” she says. “So all mums produce enough speech for their babies to learn from while in the womb, just by going about their everyday business and by talking to neighbours, friends, co-workers and family members.”

The study also suggests that the advice midwives routinely give to pregnant women around the 16-week mark to start speaking directly to their bumps isn’t as silly as I had initially assumed.

I did try. I would lie in bed and try to strike up a conversation with my own tummy, but I always felt slightly self-conscious – I can feel every kick and wriggle and the baby knows exactly when I am eating, sleeping or exercising. We are completely conjoined – do I really need to make small talk about the latest tiny cardigan I’ve bought him?

Gervain, luckily, doesn’t seem to think I should worry too much: “We are biologically designed to produce the right kind of stimulation by default,” she says. “Mums should not feel any pressure to do better.”

Equally, advice on talking to your bump has – until now – been more about forging a bond between mother and child than helping them one day talk earlier. “Making a connection with your baby helps you feel very close to them even before they are born,” says Susan Harris, a doula who works with pregnant women before and after birth. “By six months, your baby can hear music and voices and recognise familiar voices, and feeling them kick when you chat to them can feel really rewarding.”

Relaxing 

But for the high-achieving sort of parent – the one with a beady eye on the school that can get them into the Oxbridge college and catapult them into the perfect job – is there really an ideal aural environment to create? 

Unborn babies, apparently, react to the tone of our voices – research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that speaking to a foetus in a low cooing voice (in the same tone you would for a sleepy child in your arms) could relax both the mother and the baby, while trying not to raise your voice during an argument could reduce cortisol, which is always a good thing. “Some studies have shown that high levels of stress in pregnancy may cause certain problems during childhood, such as trouble paying attention or other mental health conditions,” says Harris.

As for those babies in China – it seems that the early exposure to Mandarin and Cantonese (both of which are multi-tonal languages, compared to English, which is single tone) had the biggest effect on them developing perfect pitch. Although short of getting really into the work of Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat, this is a difficult one for many of us to achieve. 

And for anyone who is less interested in their baby’s future academic and musical achievements and more focused on trying to find ways to get them to sleep when they’re out in the world, there are a few pre-birth tactics you can try.  

Developing fondness

Playing Beethoven doesn’t seem to have much more of an impact than Beyoncé, but research has shown that babies can develop a fondness for music they have heard in utero (although don’t ever put a speaker or earphones directly on your tummy as the resulting sound can be too loud when transmitted through the amniotic fluid).

After they are born, playing that same music should help them relax and fall asleep faster as it reminds them of the comfort of the womb. This means that parents need to think quite carefully about whether the album they listen to religiously while preparing dinner at nine months pregnant will be quite so appealing at 3am with a mewling infant.  

Equally, getting your husband or partner to talk directly to the bump does have an impact as most babies seem to recognise voices they have regularly heard in utero – and no woman wants to be in the position of being the only adult in the house who can soothe a screaming child. “It’s also a great way of getting dads to feel involved,” adds Harris. 

As for us, I’m still (hopefully) a month away from having the baby but my husband and my father have both made playlists for him, which we turn on every evening – often to a gratifying flurry of kicks and the occasional bout of hiccoughs.