Doctor responds to viral video of three-day-old newborn baby crawling
If you've been on TikTok at all lately (of course you have, why else would you be here!?) then you've probably seen one video in particular doing the rounds. In the clip, which has so far had 47.4 million views, a three-day-old newborn baby lifts their head and begins to crawl around their crib – much to the shock their parents and viewers across the world.
"I still cant believe this happened…" the baby's mother (@samantha_elizabeth__) says in the caption of the post, to which someone in the comments section replies: "Pandemic babies [are] just built different!"
"She's got places to go and people to see," someone else writes, as another TikToker comments, "Super girl." Amidst all the confusion in the comments section, one doctor decided to put an end to the superpower speculation, revealing exactly what's going on here...
Why is my newborn crawling?
"What this baby is doing is very normal," explains Dr Karan Raj in a TikTok video of his own. "Tiny humans are pre-programmed with certain software updates for survival," he adds, noting that: "One of these inbuilt features is the crawling reflex or the breast crawl."
"Basically, this baby is hungry and is hunting for a free boob," Dr Raj goes on. "In fact, if you put a baby on a mother's tummy, it will crawl towards the source of milk like a homing beacon and latch onto the breast. That's dedication."
As for when the crawling reflex appears, Dr Raj says this typically happens around "six weeks and then disappears". However, it's easy to miss. "A lot of newborns are swaddled and wrapped up like pancakes, so many people don't get to witness these baby Olympics."
As well as being 'programmed' to search for a free boob, Dr Raj notes that there are plenty of other reflexes that babies are born with, these include the grasp reflex (whereby stroking the palm of a baby's hand causes them to close their fingers in a grasp).
So – as many TikTokers have suggested – is this so-called superpower something that only pandemic babies have developed? Not quite! Although there's plenty of comments arguing that pandemic babies are "built different", Dr Raj says with a laugh: "All babies are capable of doing this, not just panny-d babies."
There you have it!
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