Baby's stretching & nature vs nurture

One of the things that's amazing about being a parent is seeing which abilities babies are naturally born with vs those that they figure out on their vs those that they learn from watching other people. We get to make our own observations and draw our own conclusions about the age-old nature versus nurture debate.

The baby behavior that got me thinking about this tonight is one that I see every night when I wake my son up for his dream feed. I'm actually not sure what we call in English, but in Chinese we call it "伸懒腰" (shēn lǎn yāo). I'd describe it as the stretch that we do when we just wake up or are sleepy or drowsy where you hold your hands above your head while stretching your back and extending your legs.

Prior to having a baby, I assumed that this stretch was either a cultural behavior...something that we picked up from watching family members or people in movies. But once I saw my son doing this stretch after only a month or two of life, before he had any opportunity to see anyone else doing it, it became clear that my assumption was wrong. It's either something we naturally are born knowing to do or that we figure out on our own.

In the nature versus nurture debate, I started with a bias towards nurture. I suspect I'm going to find out that a lot of what I assumed was nurture was actually nature.