(The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) -- What can you learn from four babies in four different countries engaged in 89 minutes of dialogue-free interaction with the world? A lot, it turns out.

On Friday, "Babies," a documentary by French director Thomas Balmes, hits theaters just in time for Mother's Day weekend promising to offer even experienced parents a few lessons in child-rearing.

The stars of the film are Ponijao of Namibia; Bayar in Mongolia; Mari of Japan and Hattie in San Francisco. For one year, Balmes followed the quartet through their day-to-day lives, filming them from birth to their first steps.

Lighter moments include the endless hours of entertainment Bayar gets from a roll of toilet paper, and the already famous clip of Ponijao battling a mean case of the sleepies.

The film also depicts more serious cultural differences that govern how we rear our children, raising the underlying question of who is doing it best.

All too soon, the babies are crawling and eventually walking, as the film ends with a triumphant Bayar pulling himself up on his own two feet with the wind whipping through his hair.

Closing credits include shots of each baby as a happy and healthy 4-year-old as if to assure viewers that they all turned out OK, but you can't help but leave the theater with a few surprising conclusions having viewed the world from the eyes of its newest inhabitants.

Babies are far more capable of entertaining themselves than we think. Ponijao spent a lot of time exploring nature, banging two rocks together (and occasionally eating them) as play. Bayar counted farm animals as his playmates during the hours he lies staring at the ceiling while wrapped in tight swaddling on a cot. Hattie and Mari were hustled off to Mommy and Me-type classes in chic Maclaren strollers (Mari's anyway), and were constantly being read to or taken to the park with seemingly little time to just figure things out on their own. In what seemed a testament to her impatience with so much structure, Hattie attempted to walk out of one class leaving her father in circle time alone.

Medical practices vary dramatically around the world. Though most of the babies were delivered in hospital-like environments and received some sort of pediatric care, only Hattie and Mari were taken to appointments at doctor's offices.

The same goes for cultural practices. In several poignant scenes, Balmes shows the babies at bath time. Bayar gets clean with a shot of breast milk to the face, while Ponijao gets licked and picked with his mom's saliva and tongue. Viewers see Hattie taking a bath with mom and getting Waterpik rinsed during a shower with Dad.

Babies are pretty darn resilient. They survive beatings from siblings (Bayar), ingesting river water (Ponijao), playground spills (Hattie) and frustration with blocks (Mari). And more often than not, that survival comes with little to no interference from the grown-ups around them.

Copyright 2010 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution