The erroneous belief about the healthfulness of crying survives even today in one of the items factored into the Apgar score, a test that physicians use to assess a newborn’s condition rapidly in the first few minutes after birth. Babies get an extra two points for “crying lustily”. I remember pondering this back in the mid-1970s, when I was the director of a university hospital’s newborn nursery, even before fathering a high-need baby had turned me into an opponent of crying it out. It seemed to me that awarding points for crying made no sense physiologically. The newborn who was in the state of quiet alertness and breathing normally was actually pinker than a crying infant, even though the quiet baby lost points on the Apgar score. It amazes me that the most intriguing of all human sounds – the infant’s cry – is still so misunderstood.
it’s not your fault
Parents, take heart! If you are responsive to your baby and try to keep him feeling secure in his new world, you need not feel that it’s your fault if your baby cries a lot. Nor is it your job to make your baby stop crying. Of course, you stay open to learning new things to help your baby, like a change in your diet (see Chapter 10), or a new way of wearing baby (see here), and you get your doctor involved if you suspect a physical cause behind the crying (see Chapter 10). But there will be times when you won’t know why your baby is crying – you’ll wonder if baby even knows why he’s crying. There may be times when baby needs to cry, perhaps because he just feels stressed. You needn’t feel desperate to make him stop after trying all the usual things. It’s a fact of new parent life that although babies cry to express a need, the style in which they do so is the result of their own temperament. Don’t take your baby’s cries personally. Your job is to create a supportive environment that lessens your baby’s need to cry, to offer a set of caring and relaxed arms so that your baby does not need to cry alone, and to do as much detective work as you can to figure out why your baby is crying and how you can help. The rest is up to your baby.
When I was confused about my mothering, I asked a seasoned, calm, impartial mother to observe how I handled my baby on a typical day in my home. Even though I know I am the expert on my own baby, sometimes it is hard to be objective, and the voice of experience can be helpful.
Letting baby cry desensitizes mother. Not only is the cry-it-out advice bad for babies, it’s bad for mothers. When we began writing about babies, we interviewed hundreds of mothers about their views on the cry-it-out advice. Ninety-five per cent of the mothers told us that this advice went against their basic intuition. It made them feel “not right”. We concluded that 95 per cent of mothers couldn’t be wrong.
Besides being physiologically harmful to babies, the cry-it-out advice makes no physiologic sense for mothers. The infant’s cry affects the mother’s body chemistry, and that’s what makes it so special. No other sound in the world triggers such intense emotions in the mother. The cry is supposed to do that, and the mother is supposed to feel that way.
Mothers are biologically programmed to respond to their infant’s cries. When a mother goes against her basic intuitive response and “hardens her heart against the little tyrant”, she desensitizes herself to the language of her infant. This opens the door and lets in the “infection” of insensitivity, which can one day land mother, father, and child in the office of the discipline counsellors. Insensitivity gets new parents into trouble and makes their job more and more difficult.
the shutdown syndrome
Throughout our twenty-five years of working with parents and babies, we have grown to appreciate the correlation between how well children thrive (emotionally and physically) and the style of parenting they receive. First-time parents Linda and Nigel brought their four-month-old high-need baby, Heather, into my surgery for consultation because Heather had stopped growing. Heather had previously been a happy baby, thriving on a full dose of attachment parenting. She was carried many hours a day in a baby sling, her cries were given a prompt and nurturant response, she was breast-fed on cue, and she was literally in physical touch with one of her parents most of the day. The whole family was thriving and this style of parenting was working for them. Well-meaning friends convinced these parents that they were spoiling their baby, that she was manipulating them, and that Heather would grow up to be a clingy, dependent child.
Like many first-time parents, Nigel and Linda lost confidence in what they were doing and yielded to the peer pressure of adopting a more restrained and distant style of parenting. They let Heather cry herself to sleep, scheduled her feedings, and for fear of spoiling, they didn’t carry her as much. Over the next two months Heather went from being happy and interactive to sad and withdrawn. Her weight levelled off, and she went from the top of the growth chart to the bottom.
Heather was no longer thriving, and neither were her parents.
After two months of no growth, Heather was labelled by her doctor “failure to thrive” and was about to undergo an extensive medical workup. When the parents consulted me, I diagnosed the shutdown syndrome. I explained that Heather had been thriving because of their responsive style of parenting. Because of their parenting, Heather had trusted that her needs would be met and her overall physiology had been organized. In thinking they were doing the best for their infant, these parents let themselves be persuaded into another style of parenting. They unknowingly pulled the attachment plug on Heather, and the connection that had caused her to thrive was gone. A sort of baby depression resulted, and her physiologic systems slowed down. I advised the parents to return to their previous high-touch, attachment style of parenting: to carry her a lot, breast-feed her on cue, and respond sensitively to her cries by day and night. Within a month Heather was once again thriving.
We believe every baby has a critical level of need for touch and nurturing in order to thrive. (Thriving means not just getting bigger, but growing to one’s potential, physically and emotionally.) We believe that babies have the ability to teach their parents what level of parenting they need. It’s up to the parents to listen, and it’s up to professionals to support the parents’ confidence and not undermine it by advising a more distant style of parenting, such as “let your baby cry it out” or “you’ve got to put him down more.” Only the baby knows his or her level of need; and the parents are the ones that are best able to read their baby’s language.
Babies who are “trained” not to express their needs may appear to be docile, compliant, or “good” babies. Yet these babies could be depressed babies who are shutting down the expression of their needs, and they may become children who don’t ever speak up to get their needs met and eventually become the highest-need adults.
There cannot be a rigid yes or no answer to this question. The mother-infant communication network is too intricate and sensitive to be subjected to dictums from an outsider. But be warned: it is the rare baby who follows the cry-it-out time charts displayed in various baby books over the past hundred years. These charts promise that crying will diminish; for many babies and in many circumstances this is not true. Nevertheless, there are times when you’d like some guidelines on how to hold up your end of the communication network while still giving your baby opportunities to grow toward independence.
The following guidelines are not meant to override your sensitivity. If, when, and how you decide to let your baby or toddler solve his difficulties without you must remain a parental cry-by-cry judgement.
Here are some suggestions to help you decide how quickly you need to respond to cries:
1. Listen to yourself. Listen to your own inner sensitivity as to whether any part of the cry-it-out approach is right for you, right for your baby, right for your baby’s