21/01/2026
A baby cannot explain what they’re feeling. They can’t narrate memories, name fears, or describe what they understand. And yet, anyone who has truly looked into a baby’s eyes knows the truth: someone is in there. Watching. Processing. Responding.
For a long time, babies were thought of as blank slates, unaware, unformed, waiting for language to switch consciousness on. Modern psychology and neuroscience tell a very different story. Babies are not empty. They are absorbing the world with astonishing speed and depth, guided by a subconscious intelligence designed for one overriding purpose: survival.
Babies are born completely dependent. They cannot regulate their emotions, meet their own needs, or keep themselves safe. Because of this, they are biologically wired to look to their parents as their source of safety, truth, and meaning. A baby’s nervous system is constantly scanning its parents for information: Am I safe? Is the world predictable? What do I need to do to stay connected and alive?
From birth to age three, the brain is in a period of explosive growth. During these early years, children learn up to three times faster than a 16-year-old. This means babies aren’t casually noticing their environment—they are absorbing it. Tone, emotional states, consistency, stress, calm, love, absence, and tension are all taken in and encoded rapidly, before logic or language can intervene.
Babies don’t learn through explanation. They learn through exposure. The subconscious mind, the fastest learning system humans have, is fully active from the start. Tone matters more than words. Emotional consistency matters more than intention. How a parent feels matters as much as what a parent does.
Because babies are wired for survival, they cannot question their parents. They must assume their parents are right. If something feels overwhelming, unsafe, or unpredictable, the baby cannot think, My parent is stressed, or This isn’t about me. That requires adult perspective. Instead, the baby adapts internally.
This is how many lifelong problems begin.
Parents don’t pass down their struggles through lectures or advice. They pass them down through their nervous systems. A parent with unresolved anxiety may unintentionally teach hypervigilance. A parent who learned to suppress emotion may unknowingly model emotional shutdown. A parent carrying unprocessed stress, anger, or fear shapes the emotional atmosphere the baby is immersed in every day.
This isn’t about blame. Most parents love their children deeply. But children don’t inherit intentions, they inherit patterns.
And because learning happens so quickly in the first three years, these patterns settle in deeply. They don’t form beliefs yet; they form responses. The child learns things like: I need to stay alert. I shouldn’t express this feeling. I need to adapt to keep connection. These are not conscious thoughts. They are survival strategies.
This is also why a baby sleeping in a cot upstairs is not unaffected by parents arguing downstairs. Even if the baby doesn’t understand the words, or hear every sound, the emotional atmosphere of the home has changed. Raised voices, tension, abrupt movements, and emotional volatility travel through sound, vibration, and nervous-system resonance. Many people describe this as emotion being “energy.” While it isn’t energy in a literal radio-frequency sense, emotion does move through the environment and babies are exquisitely sensitive to it.
A dysregulated home creates a dysregulated nervous system.
Over time, constant exposure to unresolved conflict teaches the baby’s body that the world is unpredictable. The nervous system adapts by staying alert. This can later appear as anxiety, hypervigilance, or chronic unease, often without any conscious memory of why.
The same principle applies to something far more common and far less discussed: mobile phones.
When a parent is frequently absorbed in their phone, scrolling, texting, responding to notifications, the baby experiences repeated moments of emotional absence. To an adult, this seems harmless. To a baby, whose survival depends on parental attention, it can feel confusing and threatening.
Babies don’t understand technology. They don’t know what a phone is or why it matters. What they experience is this: My parent’s face goes blank. Their eyes leave me. Their attention disappears.
From a baby’s nervous-system perspective, attention equals safety. Connection equals survival.
When this disconnection happens repeatedly, the baby may unconsciously anchor the phone as something that interrupts safety and connection. Not as an object to be feared intellectually—but as a signal the body reacts to. The baby’s system learns: When this thing appears, I lose my parent.
This can register as a subtle threat, not because the phone is dangerous, but because disconnection is.
Over time, this pattern can contribute to anxiety, protest behaviors, emotional withdrawal, or heightened bids for attention. Again, not as a conscious response, but as a survival adaptation learned during a period of extremely rapid brain development.
Babies don’t remember experiences as stories. They remember them as sensations. The body remembers what the mind cannot name.
And this is where many adult struggles quietly trace back to. Anxiety, people-pleasing, emotional shutdown, difficulty setting boundaries, feeling responsible for others’ emotions, these are not flaws. They are early solutions that once helped a child stay connected and safe.
The difficult truth is that many adults are not responding to life as their present-day, capable selves. They are responding through perceptions formed when they were very young. The nervous system reacts first. The adult mind explains afterward.
So someone may logically know they are safe, loved, or competent, yet still feel threatened, unseen, or not enough. That reaction isn’t coming from the wiser adult self. It’s coming from a child’s nervous system, shaped in a time when survival depended entirely on parents.
Babies seem perceptive because they are. They notice tension. They notice inconsistency. They notice emotional truth. Without language to filter experience, they encounter reality directly and they learn from it rapidly.
This doesn’t mean parents must be perfect. It means presence matters. Awareness matters. Repair matters.
And it means that healing later in life is not about blaming parents or reliving the past. It’s about recognizing what was learned before we had a choice and allowing the adult self to update those early rules.
Babies may not speak, but they are not silent inside. They are learning how the world works, how love feels, and who they need to be to belong long before they can put any of it into words.
Perhaps the real question isn’t when babies become aware but when adults realize how much of themselves was shaped by a child who was simply trying to stay alive.
Because long before we could speak, we learned.
And some part of us is still living by those lessons.