Babies -- Birth to Year One Thomas Balmes' 2010 documentary Babies portrays the stage of development that infants undergo from their birth to their first year. Focusing on four culturally diverse families and lifestyles, the film gives its viewers insight into how a child's cognitive and physical developments manifest throughout 12 months of life. One surprising aspect of the child's development stage that was shown in the documentary was the fact that even through the different parental backgrounds the basic stages that infants undergo remained ultimately the same. The children cried at certain physical impacts, they gurgled and laughed at forms of amusement, they began to speak and form words in their own languages, and they moved on to crawl, stand, and walk by the end of their first year. Regardless of nationality -- Namibian, Japanese, Mongolian, and American -- and the methods used by cultural and lifestyle constraints, there seems to be that constant approach to child-rearing that leads to similar results.

1. Child Raising Methods

In Opuwo, Namibia, Ponijao grows up with plenty mother figures and brotherly figures surrounding him. In this African town, Ponijao undergoes what seems to be a typical village rearing; his mother focuses attention upon the child, even while she works and prays. This becomes a positive reinforcement of caring, and Ponijao certainly does not lack in...

The film, however, does not show strong, fatherly figures around Ponijao. Most of the child-rearing is left to the women and the older boys -- perhaps even Ponijao's own brothers.
Bayar faces a dissimilar fatherless existence in Bayanchandmani, Mongolia. There is a father in the sidelines. The careful method that his mother undergoes to care for him are commendable and filled with forethought. One situation involves the mother's use of a matchstick as a safeguard against the child from choking on a piece of meat. The constrictions placed on him at the beginning months, however, seemed to limit Bayar's movements, a drawback for infants, who use their movements to view the world.

San Francisco, California houses Hattie, who was reared in a calm, soothing environment. Her parents emphasized the use of speech, sound, and language, evident in the books her mother read and the language her grandmother spoke. Most of Hattie's beginning stages, however, seemed constricted to the home, and there was almost never any interaction with other children her age. When Hattie did interact with other children, she spent most of that time walking to the door and trying to open it.

Mari's Japanese family in Tokyo seemed to be the ideal rearing style that one can closely relate to. She was reared with a wide degree of intellectual and physical pursuits, from the jungle gym to…