Those faint voices coming from inside are actually your first whispers of mother’s intuition. Here’s how to honor your new role and hear—loud and clear—what you already know

By Ziba Kashef, Editor at Large
Illustration by John Webster

Ask a group of moms if they’ve ever had sixth sense about their child and you’ll be flooded with eerie examples and jaw-dropping anecdotes. Like the newly pregnant mom who had a dream about a co-worker telling her she was having a boy—and nine months later she did. Or the third-trimester mom who just knew in her gut that her fetus was in breech position despite her obstetrician’s denials. After 24 hours of labor, she and the doctor discovered she had been right.

But is mothers’ intuition real? Some scientific research suggests it is, including two studies that found moms correctly predicted their unborn babies’ sex most of the time. At The University of Arizona, psychology lecturer Victor Shamas, Ph.D., recruited moms-to-be who did not yet know the sex of their babies. In a whopping 70 percent of cases, the moms’ intuition about their child’s gender was on target. In a separate study, researchers at Johns Hopkins University had comparable findings. “The fact that two different labs got similar effects suggests it’s not a fluke,” Shamas says.

While much of the data on mothers’ intuition is anecdotal, the phenomenon is no less real to moms who credit their intuitive insights with helping them better respond to their infants’ needs—or even save their babies lives. By tuning into your inner wisdom, you too can more deeply connect with your baby-to-be or newborn and parent with more confidence.

What it is—and isn’t
Intuition is an insight that comes to us out of the blue. “I define it as something you know without knowing how you know,” Shamas says. In his study, he ruled out women who guessed their child was a boy because, for example, they had a lot of nausea or because of how the fetus sat in the uterus. Those types of predictions are not based on intuition per se, Shamas explains, because they were influenced by a physical condition (nausea or acne) or a wives’ tale (such as, boy babies sit high in the womb).