They grow up so fast these days.
"Many come from across the land to visit the newborn... three year old."
— The Nostalgia Critic, The Swan Princess review
A subtrope of Dawson Casting, one specifically about newborns, or at least TV so-called newborns. Whenever a supposedly just-born child appears on TV, the baby you will see will actually be several months old. Put this down to a mixture of simple ethics, employment/casting laws, and logistics that make it unacceptable to cast a real newborn in such a role. This is because sound stages are hot, loud, bright, stuffy, and dusty places—not a great environment for a newborn infant prone to infection and unable to control body temperature.
This can have an unfortunate side effect, because Reality Is Unrealistic, making a person's first encounter with a real newborn possibly squicky. Real newborns aren't clean-looking gurgling bundles of cuteness. They're covered in mucus, blood, amniotic fluid, and other bodily substances, up to and including fecal matter. There is a chance they could be covered in a peach fuzz-like substance called lanugo (a remnant of when our ancestors were a lot hairier than we are now; most fetuses lose it before birth, but obviously, a few don't) or a waxy white substance called vernix caseosum, which is basically just congealed skin oils, dead cells, and lanugo, and serves as a sort of moisturizer for the baby before birth, when they were still submerged in amniotic fluid. Their skin will usually have a red hue to it as well and look somewhat "wrinkly", especially if they are considered premature. On top of all this, most newborns have noticeably misshapen heads from the birth process, since their skulls aren't yet closed and their bones are very flexible.note To say nothing of the placenta that should be popping out with the babe. Even newborns that have been cleaned up and are a couple of days old are generally Ugly Cute at best. It's been said that all newborn babies look like Winston Churchill.
This can even carry over to newborn animal babies, which fiction likes to depict as the cutest, smallest things ever to arrive, when in actuality, most altricial newborn animals arrive slimy, hairless, and often eyeless because their eyes may be covered by a layer of skin that takes some time to wither away. Take a look at a newborn rabbit
◊ and you'll think your bunny just gave birth to a dumpling. Marsupials (such as kangaroos, opossums, possums, quolls, and koalas) are even more altricial, looking uncannily like gummi bears and being about the same size. Even baby precocial animals (those that are active and capable of complex actions shortly after being born), like baby chicks, ducklings, guinea pigs, foals, fawns, and calves, spend most of their first hour after being born exhausted from exertion and usually very drowsy, damp, and clumsy.
In fiction, birth is a much cleaner, nicer (but still painful for the mother) process, and in American films and TV shows, usually happens in a tent. The four-month-old tot pops out of his/her mommy as clean as a whistle, gets bundled up, and is handed to Mommy (or possibly Daddy), looking around serenely. Don't expect this in real life, where a healthy newborn should actually be screaming and wailing loudly (as this indicates that they are breathing normally).note
Subtrope of Younger Than They Look.
This is an Omnipresent Trope, so only explicit justifications, aversions, subversions, inversions, parodies, particularly absurd examples, and the like should be added.
Examples
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Advertising
- Averted by this
Pampers ad, in which the baby does appear to be a newborn (albeit a cleaned-up one).
- Either TV Land or Nick-at-Nite once ran a commercial that lampshaded the entire TV-birth process, including this trope. It went something like this:
Kid: Where do babies come from?
Mother: Well, when two TV characters love each other very much, generally in the third season, the woman wears a very special pillow on her tummy. For three to five episodes. The man panics, and the woman is rushed off to hair and makeup, so she can look fresh as a daisy. And voila – four-month-old newborns!
Anime and Manga
- Blood+ has two examples, which are both justified, since the babies in question are chiropteran babies:
- The newborn Saya and Diva were described by the first Joel as having the appearance of two-month-old human babies.
- Diva's daughters are an even better example. When they emerge from their cocoons, they already have full heads of hair, as opposed to small tufts on their foreheads as Saya and Diva had, and after a moment or two of crying, they quickly shift to smiling and giggling.
- While not shown for obvious reason, a scene in Doraemon has Nobita goes back to the day he was born, when he sees himself as a baby, complaining that it's "fuzzy like a monkey" (which might have been lanugo explained above). Of course, his parents at the time didn't take this too well.
- The Dragon Ball spinoff comic Dragonball Minus interestingly plays with this trope. Son Goku was revealed to have been kept in an incubation tank for three years. Due to the length of time and extra space, he looked like a toddler◊ as soon as he was "born."
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: Doppio was an incredibly bizarre birth. His mother carried him for over two years and only showed signs of pregnancy when her water broke, his eyes were open the moment he was born, and he didn't cry at all, much to the bewilderment of the people who delivered him. His full head of hair goes uncommented on, however.
- Played for Laughs in Magi: Labyrinth of Magic—Hinahoho and Rurumu, both of whom are about seven feet tall, have a child who can not only coo and toddle seemingly from birth but is almost as big as his ten-year-old "brother" and reluctant babysitter, Ja'far.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: In a manner of speaking—the daughter of Dayakka and Kiyoh is born with a full head of hair and generally looks many months old from the first.
Comic Books
- Averted in Miracleman, where the newborn Winter Moran is shown fairly accurately; her skin is flushed, her limbs are withered, her face is wrinkled, her head is misshapen from being squeezed through a birth canal, and she's covered in gunge and placenta. Proving that Reality Is Unrealistic, Moore got reader mail asking if the baby was okay or accusing the baby of being Off-Model, and had to explain that they had used a reference book containing pictures of real newborn babies. (Curiously, considering Winter Moran's nature, this is one case where an unusually mature-looking newborn would be completely warranted.)
Fan Works
- Averted in "Brother on Brother, Daughter on Mother". The Distant Finale shows Kanril Eleya giving birth to her fourth child, which she describes when she's handed to her as "wrinkled and red in the face and perfect."
- A subversion in Chapter 13 of the Superjail! fanfic Extended Stay when the Warden and the Mistress's twins are born. Sure, they had umbilical cords, but there was no mention of them being covered in blood or other fluids for that matter.
- Subverted in My Fluttering Heart. In canon, Flurry Heart looks different from other newborns, due to her having the eyes of an older pony. In this AU, it's justified because Flurry wasn't actually a newborn. Shining found her after killing Chrysalis, realized she was his daughter, and brought her home to raise with his wife. Cadence decided to pass herself off as pregnant, wait several weeks, then pretend she had just given birth.
Films — Animated
- In Tangled, when Rapunzel is supposed to be so young that her parents are still celebrating her birth, she has long hair and can hold up her own head and focus and otherwise act months older (though the surprisingly long hair could be because her hair's magical). The narration describes the period of time before Gothel abducts her as "a moment."
- In Hercules, the title character has presumably just been born at the beginning since, as in the above examples, his birth is being celebrated. Yet he both looks and acts more like a one-year-old. Then again, he is a god (at least until Pain and Panic turn him mortal), so maybe aging works differently?
- The Lion King (1994): Newborn Simba is quite large and he already has his eyes opened. In real life, newborn cubs are smaller and their eyes open after a few days.
- In Megamind, both Megamind and Metroman looked about three or four months old as infants despite, at least the former, being eight days old. Baby Megamind even has two little bottom teeth. Justified since they're both aliens, so infant development might be different for their respective species.
- Animal variant: In Ratatouille, all the baby rats that are seen evacuating the colony's old home are fully furred and open-eyed, with not a pinkie to be seen. However, this might be played with, as we don't know exactly how long ago the babies were born.
- In The Rugrats Movie, Dil can say the words "poopy" and "mine", and can hold his own bottle, but otherwise behaves like a typical newborn. However, the musical number in the maternity ward features newborns who can sing when they're only about a few minutes old. Either those babies are geniuses or Dil is literally dumber than a monkey.
Film — Live-Action
- Addams Family Values borders on parody, as Baby Pubert is even able to baby-talk and crawl as soon as he gets home from the hospital. And, of course, he has Gomez's mustache. This can probably all be justified by noting that Addamses aren't supposed to be normal.
- The animal equivalent happens in Appointment with Venus, with Venus' newborn calf being much larger, cleaner and drier than he should be.
- Aversion: Children of Men used a CGI baby in the birth scene.
- Initially averted in the Rhys Darby/Sasha Alexander romcom Coming And Going: during the birth scene the baby is heard but never shown, even though its skin color is a plot point. The baby is shown a few hours later, however, and it's not as large as some of the newborns falling under this trope.
- Junior has Arnold Schwarzenegger give birth, and like George Lopez, they CGI his adult face onto a CGI baby... It's Nightmare Fuel for everyone, including Arnold, which is fair, as it is a nightmare in the film.
- Attempted aversion/bizarre example: Judd Apatow wanted to shoot an actual birth for Knocked Up; Anne Hathaway is said to have turned down the project because of this. Apatow abandoned this plan when he realized that he would need a worker's permit for the unborn child.
- When Blake hands Michelle her newborn son in Left for Dead, the baby is very large. Clean, Pretty Childbirth is averted, however, as the baby is covered in blood.
- Averted as much as possible in Man of Steel, where newborn Kal-El is all CGI for the birth scene.
- 1929 Soviet experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera, basically a Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, includes among other things real footage of a woman really popping a baby out.
- In the TV movie Million Dollar Babies, about the Dionne quintuplets, the producers used animatronic dolls for the newborn quints. Using older babies to represent the newborn Dionne girls, who were two months premature, and small for that, would have been ridiculous, and defeatist as well, since it's a major portion of the first half-hour of the film that the girls are tiny, premature, and not expected to live. In addition to that, finding five babies who looked like would be difficult. Obviously, using real, underweight newborns or preemies was out of the question. The film was made before CGI was an option.
- The Nativity Story is odd in the fact that while the baby playing Jesus could maybe pass for newborn, the baby John the Baptist comes out of the womb looking as if it's already attending preschool. The contrast between them makes the problem much worse than if they had used two older babies.
- Taken to its most insane in Rudy Ray Moore's Petey Wheatstreaw The Devils Son In Law, where the titular character emerges from the womb looking about twelve years old and wearing a diaper! He then attacks his doctor.
- An extreme example in Revenge of the Sith, where the newborn Luke and Leia, and the droid midwife, were all CGI, but still look like four-month-olds.
- Played straight in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in which Fanny, John Little's wife, gives birth to a very large newborn via Caesarian section performed by Azeem—though it is true that if any of Robin's men were to sire a giant infant, it would be Little John.
- French film Romance has what appears to be an actual birth. Close-up of the vagina and everything.
- Spike Lee's She Hate Me averted this in a rather traumatizing fashion. Not one, but two births were actually filmed and used in the movie. Pretty squicky stuff, especially since you expect the standard "mother screaming/cut to clean, swaddled child." Nope. You get two real kids popping out of real mothers right before your very eyes.
- In Spice World: when Nicola gives birth to a girl, not only is the baby a few weeks old but was a boy instead of a girl.
Geri: Now that is girl power!
- Total aversion in the film Window Water Baby Moving by Stan Brakhage, in which Brakhage actually films his own wife in the few days before giving birth, as well as the filming during the birthing process... from up close. The fact that the film that there is no music or dialogue only highlights the intense (and squicky nature) of birth. The camera only being a foot away from his wife's... "area" also lends to this feeling.
Literature
- Averted in the Tom Clancy novel The Bear and the Dragon, where President Ryan allowed the press to briefly film his newborn fourth child shortly after his birth.
- In The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, one of the "babies" offered to play baby Jesus in the Christmas pageant is a four-year-old. His mother says he can scrunch up.
- In Ramona Forever, Ramona is quite confused upon seeing her newborn sister, with her red-tinted skin and wild hair. It takes her aback to hear that she looked like this when born, but accepts it and decides it's not so bad if she grew up to be "wonderful, blunderful me".
- Vorkosigan Saga: Inverted in the novel Barrayar: Bothari tries to pass the newborn Ivan Vorpatril as being a few months old, but the person he's trying to fool quickly figures out that the boy's stated age would be correct if he changed 'weeks' to 'hours'.
- In Warrior Cats, newborn kittens start walking and talking a day or two after they're born. Real kittens don't start walking until they're around three weeks old.
Live-Action TV
- Hera on Battlestar Galactica is born tiny, bloody, and generally looking slightly premature.
- Averted in Call the Midwife, where nearly all of the babies that appear are actual newborns (except the birth scenes, which substitute a model). They can do this because both consultant midwife Terri Coates and the baby's mum are always just off-camera.
- Similarly parodied in the Chappelle's Show parody of Antwone Fisher, where close-up shots of newborn Dave show his adult head. (Wider shots show an obviously fake baby... with an enormous penis.)
- Both used and averted on Desperate Housewives in season four: Danielle's son was born with amniotic fluid and all and looked like the average newborn for quite a while afterward, but Susan's (month early) son was born perfectly clean and looked to be the average size of a four-month-old baby. Of course, Danielle's son was born on Hallowe'en and delivered by a doctor dressed as Frankenstein's Monster, which may have influenced the realistically grisly nature of the birth.
- Doctor Who: Quite neatly averted in "A Good Man Goes to War". Although it's the first time we see the baby, the previous episode ended just before the birth, and the opening scene appears at first to be just-post-birth, a throwaway line of dialogue near the beginning of the episode establishes that it's been a month since the baby was actually born, accounting for this trope.
- A subplot of an Empty Nest episode had a neighbor accusing the family dog Dreyfuss of impregnating his dog, and as proof, presenting the Westons with three puppies that were indeed clearly his (they looked like miniature versions of him), but we're also clearly. . .three months old—much larger than newborn puppies and covered with fur.
- Exaggerated and justified in an early episode of Fringe, wherein a prostitute has an emergency C-section to give birth to a child conceived less than an hour before and still growing. The resultant child matures to adulthood and dies of old age by the time the team gets to the scene.
- Parodied on The George Lopez Show. Any time a flashback occurs where George is an infant, it's an infant's body with George's head computer generated on.
- Inversion: In a Heroes flashback in season one, an eighteen-month-old Claire (an age when children are often walking and might even have a word or two in their vocabularies) was played by an eight-month-old baby.
- According to a fanbook for the show, U-Tan from Inai Inai Baa! is a one-year-old, but knows how to say many different words, often talks in full sentences, and knows different skills that real-life babies that age wouldn't know how to do, such as putting on clothes, brushing her teeth, using the toilet and cleaning up a room. In addition, her favorite food is norimaki, but doctors recommend that children under 5 years of age should not eat sushi.
- Not shown on camera, but a Law & Order about infanticidal teen parents averted the sanitized-birth elements of this trope, citing as evidence the gory mess (blood, amniotic fluid, infant feces) which the birth made of a hotel room.
- Aaron on Lost was actually a newborn at birth, but thereafter was played by a series of significantly older babies. Of course, it's difficult to find blond, blue-eyed babies in Hawaii, especially to play a character who only ages two months in three seasons of episodes.
- Red Dwarf contains a (probably unintentionally) justified example. "Future Echoes" ends with an echo of Lister holding his newborn sons Jim and Bexley, both of whom look older than newborns. However, the Unreadably Fast Text at the beginning of "Backwards" reveals that Jim and Bexley suffered from Rapid Aging, physically aging 18 years in only 3 days, so them looking several months old after they were just born makes sense.
- One Saturday Night Live skit has the newborn baby played by Will Ferrell.
- Baby Jake in the Sesame Street spin-off, Sesame English (which teaches English to foreigners, starting with Taiwanese and Chinese), is portrayed by Roger Bart (who was 37 at the time of first airing) of all people.
- The first-season episode "Brief Candle" of Stargate SG-1 has a suspiciously large newborn. However, Rapid Aging is central to the plot.
- In the fifth season premiere of Stargate Atlantis, the baby used to portray Teyla's newborn is about two weeks old. The commentary notes that they were counting down when the actual expectant mother would have her baby since it had to be at least 14 days old before they could use it in the scene.
- Averted on Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Disaster" when Keiko O'Brien gives birth to Molly with a cutaway shot that looks realistic.
- According to the companion book, a half-Bajoran, half-Cardassian newborn was needed for an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, so they got the guys who built Chucky to do it. Sadly (and hilariously), the baby really looked like a Cardassian/Bajoran Chucky, so in the end, they used a normal doll wrapped in a blanket and had one cutaway scene, using a four-month-old with a small rubber prosthetic forehead applied with K-Y Jelly.
- Averted in Russian series Tainy Sledstviya season 1, where real pregnancy and childbirth of Anna Kovalchuk (as investigator Maria Shvetsova) was included, and her newborn daughter Zlata (as Maria's daughter Zlata) was shown.
- In WandaVision, Wanda's twins are born like this after a few minutes of labor, perfectly clean, and with a blanket that appears from literally nowhere. This is justified by their current reality operating like a sitcom.
- Averted in The X-Files episode "Existence". Baby William is played by Jerry Shiban, the newborn son of one of the producers of the show. He was only about two weeks old when the episode was filmed. Creepily enough, he looks like he could be Mulder and Scully's child.
- In Yellowjackets, the baby Shauna has in season 2 looks like this. It's actually a justified case, because the live baby on screen is all in her imagination and the actual baby was stillborn.
Magazines
- The Onion satirized this with one of its headlines: "Woman on TV gives birth to a four-month-old baby".
Newspaper Comics
- While Baby Blues is mainly inspired by Real Life events, the research about babies is inaccurate, possibly because the comic was created before computers.
- When Zoe was a baby, she looks older than the average newborn and has a square-ish head instead of the misshapen head that babies are usually born with.
- Hammie and Wren are another example; while they are shown with the usual after birth, and are anatomically correct, in the former's case, they never cry when they are born.
- Hammie is born with "Dumbo" ears and a full set of hair and Zoe and Wren were always seen with three hairs on their head before becoming toddlers.
- Wren, as a toddler, is the least talkative of her family and occasionally says words like "again" and yes", despite toddlers forming sentences at 2 years old.
Stand-Up Comedy
- Swedish comedian Jan Bylund about when his daughter was born:
So I called him right away and said "You're a grandfather!", and my dad asked "Who does she look like?!" Twenty minutes after a child has been born, you should not answer that question honestly, I tell you. "Who does she look like?!" Yeah, well... E.T., except blue.
- On one of his comedy albums, Bill Cosby describes how unprepared he was for his newborn's appearance:
"...As they started to clean it off... I went over to my wife, kissed her gently on the lips, and said, 'Darling, I love you very much. You just gave birth to a lizard.'"
- Ironically, when he got his own sitcom in the Eighties, he played an obstetrician.
- Chad Daniels had this response to a couple who refused to choose a name for their baby, preferring to let their newborn's beauty "inspire" them when it emerges from the womb:
"Really? Well, have fun raising a kid named StinkyUglyWrinklyPurplyShitty!"
- Robin Williams, in his concert at the Metropolitan Opera House, refers to his newborn son as "a little old man, dipped in 40-weight" (presumably, 40-weight motor oil).
Toys
- The Little Sisters of the L.O.L. Surprise! dolls look identical to their older counterparts, with some having a full head of hair.
Video Games
- Played with in Beyond: Two Souls. In the "Homeless" chapter, Jodie helps a woman give birth, and part of the mission involves cutting the newborn's umbilical cord. The baby, however, is otherwise completely clean.
Webcomics
- In Blue Yonder, while his father is still pushing his mother about in a wheelchair after his birth, Jared can sit up unaided. Maybe a moot point since he can also fly.
- In Sabrina Online, Sabrina's daughter Danielle is a variant. She has an appropriate look for a newborn◊, but she has the size of this trope. Everyone calling her "tiny" notwithstanding.
Western Animation
- In one episode of As Told by Ginger, the characters go to a farm. Off-screen they see a newborn calf and are grossed out by the afterbirth.
- On the day Pebbles was born on The Flintstones, she had enough hair for a ponytail. What's more, it's bright red. Adult redheads tend to have thin hair. Baby gingers should look nearly bald.
- Invader Zim: Smeets (baby Irkens) can walk and talk the minute they are "born", a fact that is often ignored by the fandom.
- On birth, Irkens have a PAK attached to their spine, which serves as a secondary brain and presumably what allows newborn to walk and talk.
- The Ren & Stimpy Show averts this whenever possible. Any shots of newborn babies show them with translucent red skin, showing off veins and eyeballs for maximum ickiness.
- Literally every baby in Rugrats, with Dil to a lesser extent. Dil's a newborn, yet he can say a few words and hold his own bottle. Meanwhile, Chuckie is two years old and can only say the word "no" around the adults. In real life, 2-year-olds are typically more verbal than that.
- On T.O.T.S., it is explicitly stated that the delivery storks deliver babies on the day they are born. However, all of the babies look and behave more like toddlers.
- Voltron: Legendary Defender: In flashbacks, Lotor, Allura, and Keith are all seen as newborns. All three are unusually large for newborn infants, are without red-toned skin, and have full heads of hair. Baby Allura can even hold up her head while wearing a too-large helmet. Possibly justified since the first two are aliens and the third is a human-alien hybrid.
Other
- Quite common in paintings depicting Jesus' birth.
- Exaggerated in Medieval paintings; all babies looked like miniature adults instead of like actual children.
- A So Bad, It's Good birther video purporting to be proof that Barack Obama was born in Kenya featured, among its many errors, a newborn that appeared to be six months old.
- In animals, this is referred to as being precocial, when an animal comes out of the egg or womb ready to fend for itself. Most reptiles do this, as well as several bird species (notably ratites and fowl). It's comparatively rare amongst mammals, but...
- Guinea pig pups are born fully furred, with open eyes, running around. They are essentially born as three-month-old newborns.
- Same thing goes for hares, as well as any other animals that stand and walk soon after birth (like horses and cows).
- Among the reptiles, black mambas are particularly well known for their precociality, as within hours of hatching they leave the nest and set out to begin hunting for food.
- Taken to extremes by Arctic seals, which give birth on unstable pack ice. Because there's no solid place on which to park a baby seal for longer than a few weeks, tops, female seals bear highly-developed young that only need to nurse for a short period, as little as four days for hooded seals. For those that spend a bit longer, being precocial also helps keep them safe while their mothers are away, leading to the adorable sights (and sounds) of 'yelling' harp seals on the Arctic pack ice.
- This would apply to kiwis, where, once they hatch, they can fend for themselves.
- Megapode chicks are so well-developed that they can fly within a day or so of hatching.
- Spotted Hyenas are born with their eyes open and their teeth already erupted and if a mother gives birth to two pups they will start fighting for dominance almost immediately.
- A bizarre case overlapping with real life that also showed Reality Is Unrealistic in 2004 when Bobbie Jo Stinnett was murdered by Lisa L. Montgomery and had her baby crudely cut from her womb, with Montgomery claiming the baby was hers and taking her home. When investigators arrived at Montgomery's home and saw the infant, they noticed that the day-old baby's head was round and not conical, which was an indication that the child had not been delivered vaginally, as Montgomery claimed. This is because a newborn's skeleton is mainly formed by cartilage (the flexible structure in your nose or ears), rather than bone. An infant's skull also features flexible points referred to as fontanelles that are designed to move slightly to allow the baby to descend through the birth canal - being pushed out of a vagina puts a fair bit of pressure on the infant's skull, and the fontanelles do their job, resulting in a distinctive shape that usually takes about a week or so to disappear. This, along with other evidence, allowed them to arrest Montgomery and return the baby to her real father.
- Something similar happened in one of Joe Kenda's cases, where a woman noticed that her friend's supposed newborn was much too big. Upon hearing the news report about the kidnapping of a one month old baby, she became even more suspicious and reported it to the police. Sure enough, they themselves saw that the child was several weeks old rather than several days and arrested her for the abduction.
- Anatomy texts depicting childbirth show the infant in correct proportion, but generally omit the blood, fragments of the amniotic sac, and other messy elements because it would obscure details in the illustration.
- On extremely rare occasions, babies can be born with a full head of hair. One example is Chanco, a baby girl born in Japan.
