In the moments after we give birth, we desperately want to hear our baby cry. In the middle of the night a few months later it’s no longer exactly music to our ears, but those cries aren’t just telling us that baby needs a night feeding: They’re also giving us a hint at what our children may sound like as kindergarteners, and adults.

New research published in the journal Biology Letters suggests the pitch of a 4-month-old’s cry predicts the pitch they’ll use to ask for more cookies at age five and maybe even later on as adults.

The study saw 2 to 5-month olds recorded while crying. Five years later, the researchers hit record again and chatted with the now speaking children. Their findings, combined with previous work on the subject, suggest it’s possible to figure out what a baby’s voice will sound like later in life, and that the pitch of our adult voices may be traceable back to the time we spend in utero. Further studies are needed, but scientists are very interested in how factors before birth can impact decades later.

“In utero, you have a lot of different things that can alter and impact your life — not only as a baby, but also at an adult stage,” one of the authors of the study, Nicolas Mathevon, told the New York Times.

The New York Times also spoke with Carolyn Hodges, an assistant professor of anthropology at Boston University who was not involved in the study. According to Hodges, while voice pitch may not seem like a big deal, it impacts how we perceive people in very real ways.

Voice pitch is a factor in how attractive we think people are, how trustworthy. But why we find certain pitches more or less appealing isn’t known. “There aren’t many studies that address these questions, so that makes this research especially intriguing,” Hodges said, adding that it “suggests that individual differences in voice pitch may have their origins very, very early in development.”

So the pitch of that midnight cry may have been determined months ago, and it may determine part of your child’s future, too. There are still so many things we don’t know, but as parents we do know one thing: Our babies cries (as much as we don’t want to hear them all the time) really are something special.

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