Can a Sonogram Reveal Baby’s Personality?
Actress Casey Wilson swears the son she’s expecting will be shy based on her sonograms. Is she on to something? Photo by Christopher Polk/NBC/NBCU/Getty Images.
Saturday Night Live alum Casey Wilson obviously jokes around a lot. But she wasn’t kidding when she recently told Fit Pregnancy magazine that she believes the sonogram photos of her unborn son show that he’s not going to take after her, personality-wise.
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“We’ve done a couple …and he seems to always have his hands over his eyes,” says the Marry Me actress, 34, of the little boy she’s expecting in May with TV writer David Caspe. “My husband said, ‘Thank God he doesn’t appear to want the spotlight like his mom!’ He seems very shy, which we’re both kind of relieved about.”
But can an ultrasound exam really give parents a hint about what their child will be like?
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“There’s nothing about a child’s personality that you can detect from an ultrasound,” Jose Carugno, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine tells Yahoo Parenting. That bashful pose is “basically just a random position the baby happens to be in.” Adds Shari Brasner, an obstetrician at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City: “There isn’t too much room in there, so babies’ hands are often near the face.”
Children’s personality traits do develop early on, Isabel Blumberg, also an obstetrician at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, tells Yahoo Parenting, but there’s no way to discern them in the womb. “They start to exhibit signs soon after they’re born so when doctors are doing sonograms and say things like ‘Aw, she’s being shy,’ as babies cover their faces or genitalia, that’s just us commenting,” she says. “The child’s movements are instinctive, not anything that would reveal personality.”
Not even the frequency or absence of kicks you may see (not to mention feel), indicate how sporty your son or daughter could turn out to be. “Activity level in utero doesn’t have bearing on whether the baby will be especially physical,” says Blumberg. “It just shows that you have a healthy baby.”
What moms and dads may be able to predict looking at sonograms is what their child looks like. “There may be attributes that you can pick out from your family resemblances,” says Blumberg. In other words, when you catch a glimpse of your mother-in-law’s profile in that 3D ultrasound, you may not be seeing things. “Sometimes you can see physical things about your baby that you recognize,” she says. “Who’s to say if the likeness is really there? That’s in the eye of the beholder.”
The only definitive attributes a sonogram can reveal, says Brasner, are normal or abnormal anatomy, size, position of the placenta, amniotic fluid volume, and a few other important obstetric factors as well as… baby’s coiffure. That’s right. “An ultrasonographer,” says Brasner, “can see if a baby has a lot of hair.”
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