Baby Has Sweet Emotional Reaction To Mom's Singing

In this adorable video we see baby’s emotional reaction to mother singing “Love Like This” by Lauren Daigle. Jaxson doesn’t say a word, but the look on his face speaks volumes. The emotional rollercoaster he’s riding while mom sings this song is written on his face like graffiti on the walls of a subway station.

It’s probably safe to say that young Jaxon doesn’t understand the words to the music, but rather it’s the melody, itself, he’s emotionally reacting to. He looks like he’s only a few months old, but he obviously spent nine months listening to his mother’s singing from the inside. Now he gets to hear mom “unplugged” version, and he has the most adorable reaction to it. It’s almost more than he can bear!

“Please, Mom! You don’t know what you’re doing to me! I don’t want to break down like this in front of the camera.”

We can’t really accuse Jaxon of acting like a baby, because, well, he’s a baby. In some weird way Jaxon is behaving more grown up, even more cultured than most grownups. He doesn’t have the filters that adults build up to protect their ego from criticism. He allows himself to express honestly, because he has not yet learned to wear a protective mask.

Jaxon strikes me as one of us who can’t hold a poker face; who wears his heart up his sleeve. He seamlessly expresses a range of emotions, even at extremes, in the space of a few seconds. We know babies cry when they need changing, are hungry, or tired, and a few other discomforts. We know babies can smile and laugh over silly gestures or tickling. But Jaxson’s emotional expression seems more nuanced than biological reactions his basic needs.

The music is casting some kind of magic spell over him. He’s tuned in to subtle cues. These are probably a multimedia mixture of tactile sensation, facial recognition, and auditory. As far off observers we can hear what most of what Jaxon hears, but we can never feel what he is feeling, lying in mom’s arms, or even see her face. It’s not beyond our imagination, however.

What if we could do an experiment and put a total stranger’s baby in this mother’s arm, and ask her to sing exactly as she is doing with her own baby? You can imagine that this video might look very different. Maybe the baby would be happily engaged, or maybe it would cry and want to be taken away from this unknown woman. The idea is that Jaxon is responding to many more cues than just the sound of a woman singing. Jaxon is intimately connected to this one woman in particular. Her words, whatever they are, were specially made for him and no other.

There was a song from 1972 sung by Paul Simon, “Mother and Child Reunion”. It’s said the song was about an item on a Chinese restaurant menu, but that’s not how most people remember it. It was an iconic anthem to the special bond, quite literally, between mother and child. One day the nest will be too big for Jaxon, and he’ll strike out on his own. But that’s not on his mind just yet.