Burping the baby

This is part of a series of blog posts that is inspired by our baby daughter, Miru.

Imitation, it seems, begins as soon as our children open their eyes, just in ways we are unable to recognize due to our preoccupation with highbrow communication techniques like smiling and cooing. What if the baby develops its ability to mimic parental behavior from the inside out? After all, nothing seems more precocious than an infant’s digestive tract.

With this hypothesis in mind, I burped my baby by burping myself (I am blessed with the potentially gross ability to induce a burp without imbibing any lager). And it works: Miru happily belched in response to what she heard. Isn’t that fascinating? I wondered what the endless wisdoms of the Internets say about this, and got an approximate 450,000 search results for “induce baby burp”. Most of the advice describes how we have to gently sit the baby forward on our knee, put her over our shoulder, of gently pat or stroke their back.