Parenting is a journey. Parenting a high-need child is a journey where you unwittingly end up in uncharted territory. Before your baby’s birth you imagine what the journey will be like. You buy guidebooks. You listen to friends who have taken similar trips. It’s exciting. Your baby is born and the journey begins. Suddenly your trip isn’t going as planned. Your child is not following the guidebooks. He takes you on a different journey, one that you might not have chosen and certainly not the one you had anticipated. Initially, you resent this change in travel plans. The road is bumpy. It is lonely. And it’s costing you much more energy than you had budgeted. But you’ve purchased a non-refundable ticket, so you must go on. While your friends are seeing all the popular sights, your child pulls you off the usual paths, down side roads, and into places where you’re forced to carve some new trails on your own. The trip is tiring and challenging. You have difficulty sharing your discoveries with your friends; they haven’t been where you’ve been or seen the world through your child’s eyes. Before long, though, you will gradually begin to realize how much richer your life is and how much wiser you are for having experienced this special journey.
Sitting in the high school auditorium one spring evening, we proudly watched our seventeen-year-old daughter, Hayden, take her bows following the school’s production of Oklahoma! She’d played the role of Ado Annie wonderfully, yet it was the Hayden we saw after the curtain call who warmed our hearts the most.
We watched how she cared for her friends – the eye contact, the hugs, the delightfully natural social gestures, and the expressivity that drew people, magnet-like, into her presence. As a tear or two flowed down her dad’s cheeks, we thought back to “Hayden the handful” – the demanding baby, the strong-minded toddler, the challenging preschooler, the full-of-energy grade-schooler, and the exhausting teen. Now we are seeing a dynamic adult beginning to emerge. How the three of us got through those years and to this point in our lives inspired this book. Here’s the story of the baby we got and the lessons we learned.
Hayden stretched us as parents and as individuals. Our first three children were relatively “easy” infants. They slept well and had a predictable feeding routine. Their needs were easy to identify – and satisfy. In fact, I began to suspect that parents in my paediatric practice who complained about their fussy babies were exaggerating. “What’s all the fuss about difficult babies?” I wondered.
Then came Hayden, our fourth, whose birth changed our lives. Our first clue that she was going to be different came within a day or two. “I can’t put her down”, became Martha’s recurrent theme. Breast-feeding for Hayden was not only a source of food, but also a constant source of comfort. Martha became a human pacifier.
Hayden would not accept substitutes. She was constantly in arms and at her mother’s breast – and after a while those arms and breasts would get tired. Hayden’s cries were not mere complaints, they were all-out alarms. Well-meaning friends suggested, “Just put her down and let her cry it out.” That didn’t work at all. Her extraordinary persistence kept her crying. Her cries did not fade away. They intensified if we didn’t respond.
Hayden was very good at teaching us what she needed. “As long as we hold her, she’s content” became our baby-care slogan. If we tried letting her fuss, she only fussed harder. We played “pass the baby”. When Martha’s arms gave out, into mine Hayden came. We used a front-pack carrier we had saved from brother Peter’s baby days, but Hayden liked it only when we were out walking.
Nights were not bad in the early months, considering how intense she was by day. But around six months that all changed, and her nights became high-need. She rejected her cot as if it were a cage. After fourteen hours of baby holding, we longed for some nighttime relief. Hayden had other plans. As soon as we put her down in her cot and tried to creep out of the bedroom, she would awaken, howling in protest at having been left alone. Martha would nurse her back to sleep in the rocking chair, then put her back into her cot, and after an hour or less she would awaken again, demanding a repeat of the rocking-chair-and-nursing routine. It soon became evident that Hayden’s need for human contact was as high at night as it was during the day.
If Hayden had been our first child, we would have concluded that it was our fault she couldn’t settle herself, since we were inexperienced parents. But she was our fourth child, and by this time we felt we had a handle on caring for children. Nevertheless, Hayden did cause us to doubt our parenting abilities. Our confidence was getting shaky as our energy reserves were nearing empty. Our feelings about Hayden were as erratic as her behaviour. Some days we were empathetic and nurturing; other days we were exhausted, confused, and resentful of her constant demands. Such mixed feelings were foreign to us, especially after parenting three easily managed babies. Soon it became obvious that Hayden was a different kind of baby. She was wired differently from other babies.
lesson
It wasn’t our fault. Hayden fussed because of her temperament, not because of our parenting abilities.
The challenge for us was to figure out how to mother and father this unique little person while also conserving enough energy for our other three children – and ourselves.
Our first obstacle to overcome was our professional past. We were educated in the fifties and sixties, so we were victims of the prevailing parenting mind-set of those times – fear of spoiling. We entered parenthood believing it was mandatory to control our children lest they control us. And there was that horrible fear of being manipulated. Were we losing control? Was Hayden manipulating us? We consulted books, a useless exercise. No baby book contained a chapter on Hayden. And the mostly male authors were either beyond child-rearing age or seemed far removed from the trenches of everyday baby tending. Yet here we were, two experienced adults, whose lives were being taken over by a ten-pound infant.
Hayden opened us up as people. The turning point came when we closed the baby books and opened our hearts to our child. Instead of defensively getting caught up in the fear of spoiling, we started listening to what Hayden had been trying to tell us from the moment she exited the womb. As soon as we discarded our preconceived ideas of how babies are supposed to be and accepted the reality of how Hayden was, we all got along much better.
If she fussed when we put her down but was content when we held her, we would hold her. If she needed to feed a lot, Martha would feed her. We believed Hayden knew what she needed, and fortunately she had the persistence to keep telling us until we understood.
lesson
Hayden’s persistent personality forced us to keep working at a parenting style until we found what worked.
Hayden taught us that tiny babies don’t manipulate, they communicate. A child psychologist friend who was visiting us was interested in Hayden’s cry. She was impressed that the cry was not an angry, demanding one but rather