by Sara McGinnis posted in Parenting

You already know your baby cries less when you're up and walking, but do you know why" It turns out they're not just being temperamental -- they're trying not to get attacked by predators.
Imagine, for a moment you're a helpless infant a few hundred or thousand years ago. The safest place for you to be is going to be in your parents' arms (and it may as well be mom's arms, should you get hungry). Being held by your mother while she's sitting is better than being on your own, but best of all is when she's up and ready to whisk you away from anything that thinks you'd make a tasty snack.
While she's on the run you're going to get calm and quiet so as not to alert whatever you both are fleeing where you are, and encourage her to continue holding you.
I'm not just making this up. Researches have looked into the human flight response that developed over a few millennia, paying special attention to babies.
"The infant calming response to maternal carrying is a coordinated set of central, motor, and cardiac regulations," the authors wrote in a 2013 study published in Current Biology.
"Infants under six months of age carried by a walking mother immediately stopped voluntary movement and crying and exhibited a rapid heart rate decrease...The calming responses may increase the survival probability of the infant in cases of emergency escape by the mother-infant dyad."
For the study, scientists monitored the heart rates o...