At delivery, your baby’s powerful wails are a welcome sign that you’ve given birth to a healthy child. However, if after the first week or two your infant continues to scream, his crying may become the last thing you want to hear! But we should be grateful for our babies’ crying—it’s one of their most wonderful abilities.
During the first few months of life, your baby will have no problem getting by without the foggiest idea of how to smile or talk, but he would be in terrible danger if he couldn’t call out to you. Getting your attention is so important that your newborn can cry from the moment his head pops out of you. This great ability is called the “crying reflex.”
A baby’s cry … cries to be turned off.
Peter Ostwald, Soundmaking: The Acoustic Communication of Emotion
My guess is that millions of years ago, a Stone Age baby accidentally was born with a perfect way for getting his mother to come to him—screaming. Even if he yelped just because he had hiccups or had scared himself, his mom appeared in seconds.
Other baby animals also need to get their mother’s attention quickly, but they would never scream for it. Loud crying could be fatal for a young rabbit or a monkey, because the sound might reveal his location to a hungry lion. For this reason, kittens meekly meow for help, squirrel monkeys make soft beeping sounds when they fall out of trees, and baby gorillas barely even whimper when they need their moms.
Baby humans, on the other hand, gave up such caution a long time ago. Whenever they needed their cavemom’s attention, they wailed! Perhaps such brash, demanding babies were safe because their parents were able to fight off dangerous animals. Or perhaps a powerful cry was the only sound that could carry far enough for a baby’s mom to hear him while working or chatting with friends outside the cave. Some scientists even believe that successive generations of babies began to shriek louder and louder because such noisy infants received more food and attention to keep them quiet, and thus were more likely to survive.
Why are babies born with a cry reflex … but not a laugh reflex?
Wouldn’t it be fun if babies were born laughing? Of course it would, but there are two very good reasons why newborns can cry up a storm yet can’t giggle.
First, crying is easier than laughing. It takes less coordination, because it’s one continuous sound made with each breath. Laughter, on the other hand, is a series of rapid, short sounds strung together like pearls on a single breath.
And while laughter is helpful for social play when your baby is older, crying is crucial for a baby’s minute-to-minute survival, from his first day of life.
We may never know exactly when or how ancient human babies began to cry, yet it’s clear that the cave babies who survived and passed their genes on to us were those who could “raise a ruckus.”
Your baby’s shrill cry is powerful enough to yank you out of bed or hoist you off the toilet with your pants down. (Not bad for a ten-pound weakling!) However, it is a mistake to think your baby is crying because he’s trying to call you for help. During the first few months, trying to get your attention is the furthest thing from your crying baby’s mind. In fact, your baby has absolutely no idea he’s even sending you a message.
When you hear your two-week-old scream, you’re not getting a communication from him; rather you’re accidentally eavesdropping on his conversation … with himself. His cries are like agitated complaints he’s muttering to himself, “Gosh, I’m hungry,” or “Boy, I’m cold.” Since you’re right next to him, you hear his grumbles and want to lovingly respond, “What’s the matter, sweetheart? You sound upset.”
In a few months, your baby will begin to figure out that crying makes you come. By four to six months your baby will develop a vocabulary of coos, bleats, and yells to communicate specific needs. This is when you may get the sense that your baby is beginning to make “phony” little shrieks to get you to come. But for now, don’t worry that responding to his cries will teach him bad habits. Training your baby not to be manipulative will become an important lesson during the second six months of his life. For the moment you want him to learn that you’ll come whenever he cries. This message of predictable, consistent love and support is exactly what will nurture his trust in you.
And, still Caroline cried, and Martha’s nerves vibrated in extraordinary response, as if the child were connected to her flesh by innumerable invisible fibers.
Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage
Just as your baby is born with certain automatic, built-in reflexes (like crying) you too are equipped with many automatic and irresistible feelings about your baby. Researchers proved years ago that adults are naturally attracted to an infant’s face. Your baby’s heart-shaped face, upturned nose, big eyes, and full forehead give you the urge to kiss and cuddle him for hours!
You also have special instincts to help you tell whether your infant is babbling or if he needs you urgently. Not only does your brain get the message but your body does too. That’s why your baby’s screams can really “get under your skin.” You feel your nervous system snap into “red alert” as your heart begins to race, your blood pressure soars, your palms sweat, and your stomach tightens like a fist. Studies show that a baby’s piercing cry can jolt a parent’s nervous system like an electric shock. As you might expect, scientists have also demonstrated that parents experiencing other stresses—such as fatigue, isolation, marital discord, financial stress, hormonal imbalance, problems with family or neighbors, or other serious strains—are especially susceptible to feeling overwhelmed by their baby’s cries.
It’s not just the sound of your baby’s cry that makes you want to help him, it’s how he looks too. Seeing his little fists punching at the air and his face twist in apparent pain can penetrate your heart like an arrow. Every loving fiber in your body will compel you to comfort your crying baby. This powerful biological impulse is exactly why it feels so wrong to wait outside the nursery door and let your baby cry it out.
Not only parents tune in to a baby’s cries. Single adults and children, too, find the sound of a baby crying upsetting. But new parents, especially ones without prior infant-care experience, find their baby’s crying exceptionally disturbing.
Your baby’s cry may even rekindle forgotten emotional trauma from your past. You may suddenly recall memories of prior failures or humiliations, like someone who was unfair to you, or remember people who criticized and attacked you. The crying may make you feel that you are being punished for some past misdeed. For some parents, this sense of helplessness is so intolerable that it makes them turn away from their babies’ screams and ignore their needs. (See Appendix B for more practical advice about how to survive these difficult days.)
Of course, your baby isn’t intentionally trying to make you feel guilty or inadequate. During the first few months of life, his cries are never, never, never manipulative, mean, rude, or critical. Nevertheless, those feelings may bubble up inside you when your baby screams on and on.
Our tiny baby’s first word to us wasn’t Mama or Dada. It sounded more like … well, a smoke alarm! She just blasted! It was scary because we had no idea exactly what she was trying to tell us.
Marty and Debbie, parents of two-week-old Sarah Rose
When you first bring your baby home from the hospital, every fuss can sound like a problem and every cry an urgent alarm. All parents dedicate themselves to meeting their newborn’s needs, but when your baby cries, can you tell exactly what he needs? Should you be able to figure out why your baby is upset from the sound of his cry? Is the “I’m sleepy” cry of a one-month-old different from his “I’m starving” yell?
Some baby books tell parents that with careful observation they can decipher their baby’s message from the way he cries; however, forty years of studies by the world’s leading colic researchers have taught us that’s not really true.
In a 1990 University of Connecticut study, mothers listened to the audiotaped yells of two different babies, a hungry one-month-old and a newborn who was just circumcised. They were asked if the babies were hungry, sleepy, in pain, angry, startled, or wet. Only twenty-five percent correctly identified the cry of the unfed baby as sounding like hunger (forty percent thought it was an overtired cry). Only forty percent of moms identified the cries of the recently circumcised baby as a pain cry (thirty percent thought he was either startled or angry).
You might wonder if these mothers would better understand their babies’ cries if they were more experienced. However, the evidence shows that is not the case either. Researchers in Finland asked eighty experienced baby nurses to listen to the recorded sounds of babies at the moment of birth, when hungry, when in pain, and when gurgling in pleasure. Surprisingly, even these seasoned pros only correctly identified why the baby was crying about fifty percent of the time—barely better than by chance alone.
By three months your baby will learn to make many different noises, making it easier to decipher some messages from the sound of his cry alone. However, at birth, your infant’s compact brain simply doesn’t have enough room for a repertoire of grunts and whines. That’s why during the first few months, most babies only make three simple but distinct sounds: whimpering, crying, and shrieking.
Whimpering: This mild fussing sounds more requesting than complaining, like a call from a neighbor asking to borrow some sugar.
Crying: This good strong yelp demands your attention, like when your kitchen timer goes off.
Shrieking: This last “word” is a piercing, glass-shattering wail, as shrill and unbearable as a burglar alarm.
If asked what each sound signified, you’d probably guess that whimpering means a slight unhappiness like hunger pangs or getting sleepy; crying indicates some greater distress like being very hungry, thirsty, or cold; and shrieking signals pain, fear, anger, or irritation (if earlier cries got no response).
If your baby is an easy, relatively calm child, your guesses are probably correct. As a rule, the more intense and shrill your baby’s cry is—and the quicker it escalates to a shriek—the more likely he’s in pain or needs your help right away.
And by adding a few more visual clues to the sound he’s making, you’ll increase your accuracy. For example:
In short, when an easy baby is a little upset he whimpers, like a puppy whining outside the door. Usually his protests only get louder if his cries are ignored or if he is in great distress.
The needs of fussy babies, on the other hand, are often impossible to decipher from the sound of their cries alone. These little ones lack the self-control to proceed patiently through their three-“word” vocabulary, especially when tired or overstimulated. They blow by whimpering and crying, and shift immediately into loud, piercing shrieks that make it impossible to tell whether or not they have an urgent problem. These babies often get so upset by their own screaming that it snowballs and they are crying because they’re crying! The gas or loud noise that started the wailin’ and flailin’ is almost forgotten.
Even when scientists use sophisticated acoustic analyzers to study the cries of fussy babies, they cannot find any differences between their shrieks of hunger, pain, overstimulation, boredom, startling, and even impatience. These intense babies blast out the same one-size-fits-all scream regardless of what’s bothering them.
Pam, the mother of two high-powered little boys, Matthew and Austin, told me when her boys were babies she joked with her husband that their screams were like the blasts of a smoke alarm. She said, “When you hear a smoke alarm go off, it’s impossible to tell from the sound whether it’s signaling a minor problem—burnt toast—or a calamity—your house is burning down. Likewise, with my boys, it was impossible for us to tell from the intensity of their cries if they were very ill or merely announcing a burp.”
Most of the time, even a baby’s most terrible shrieks are merely his way of telling you he’s hungry, wet, soiled, or lonely, and he will quiet once you give him what he needs. But what if your baby’s yelping persists even though his diaper is dry and you’re holding him? What happens if you try everything and he still doesn’t stop screaming?
That’s when parents start to wonder if their baby has COLIC.