▲ 305 points
back
254 comments
Great if it works for you, but for those who are dealing with babies, I wouldn't beat myself up if this advice doesn't apply. The parenting advice world is chock full of people who found something that worked for them and who then made the unwarranted conclusion that it is universal truth. For example, their techniques that "always work" definitely do not always work. Maybe they always worked for their particular babies, but I have been in situations with my kids where neither shushing and patting nor holding and walking worked to stop crying.
My general feeling is that you can drive yourself nuts trying to figure out why your baby is crying, and, as the blog author mentioned in his conclusion, you may still be unable to figure it out. IMO this is a great time of one's life to discard the illusion of control.
Every child is a whole new world, a whole new potential, and a whole new problem.
1. My first child couldn't be calmed easily, although I found a song that somehow worked. [0]
2. Second child could be soothed by slowly rubbing from his temple down past his eye to his cheek.
3. Third child hated that, but loved having her forehead rubbed slowly in a horizontal manner.
4. Fourth child just wanted a firm pressure on the top of his head (e.g., a palm, he'd also burrow up into your armpit for comfort sometimes, which was awkward when I hadn't showered that day)
5. Fifth child didn't need any of the above, just lots of hugs and kisses at bed time. Bless her.
The only generally applicable rules I found are:
* Sleeping on your chest when young where they can hear your heartbeart (I found it works best with Dad when breastfeeding, as the smell of Mom's milk tended to stir them up for a feed, even if they're struggling with wind and not able to feed) can be very calming. Ideally done skin to skin.
* Slow rocking while making a continuous "sssshhh" noise often helped - the fact I'd become a human white noise generator amused me.
* Patiently, calmly, love them. It's most important to do this when it's hardest to love them. Knowing that they can be total assholes and you'll still love them is what grows secure kids.
* Ask for help when you're struggling! A lot of your friends and family are probably desperate to help you, but they don't want to appear condescending, or to intrude. So give them permission, explicitly invite them to help, and your sanity will return, which will make you a much better parent for baby.
That's it. That's all my parenting advice after five babies.
My only advice to new parents is to largely ignore other parents' advice. Except mine, and only in this one instance.
> For example, their techniques that "always work" definitely do not always work.
Among parenting social media influencers, this is a gamble for building rapport among an audience:
Make some extreme claim that may or may not work for some portion of people who hear it. People who hear it, try it, and find that it works will vividly remember the influencer as being correct. People who try it with no results will quickly forget it about it.
Repeat across several claims and eventually some percentage of them will be correct for the audience.
Here's one that always worked for me from about 6mo to 18mo: If she was crying and I played Hamilton on my phone, she'd immediately stop crying. Then I'd figure out that had been wrong and solve the actual problem for her.
This was a 100% thing, it felt like magic, but of course I'm not gonna dole it out as even remotely likely to work with another baby.
My daughter had 3 different cries that I learned when I was left alone with her for 1 week when she was 3 weeks old.
Hungry. Wet. Tired. When I learned these she was easy to take care of.
The night terrors tho. That phase is soooo hard. 3 weeks walking up in the middle of the night screaming for no reason. Hours to get her back to sleep. Then just stops…
My own "technique that always works" (your mileage may vary) was "The hold".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2C8MkY7Co8
In my experience the baby will often resume crying as soon as you stop doing it, but we used this whenever we needed a couple minutes of relief.
Exactly.
Babies cry because they're new to the world. They have not yet grown the moderating influence of context provided by experience. Every baby is unique, with a different emotional balance.
A big chunk of parenting is figuring your kids out, and balancing that with the set of experiences they need to have in order to grow. Many of those experiences are painful, which means you also need to figure out the balance of "let them cry" and "comfort them", which also changes drastically over time.
That's where having both parents really matters, as the tension between them is essential in finding that balance.
Yeah babies are different.
My kids didn’t scream or cry much at all.
Friends whose kids screamed all the time were astonished and tried everything to figure it out.
But we had opposite experiences with kids sleeping through a the night, I’m tired just thinking of it.
I’d like to add:
it is ok to ask for help.
I always figured a baby could just have a headache or other painful/uncomfortable issues that show no symptoms and you've just got to accept that you can't always determine what they need to stop crying. I think it helps me have more sympathy and patience for them when I look at it that way.
You're absolutely right. Nevertheless it helps to have a finite list of priorities: If it's not cold,heat,hunger, discomfort,illness,tiredness (in no particular order) it's good to know that you didn't forget anything important and your baby is crying for no reason you are responsible for.
Btw. What the author calls "wicked hour" we used to call "brain pain" - like aching muscles after training, just with the developing brain. One kid wouldn't calm down after being held very tightly for minutes in a dark room and having a screaming tantrum. Once this was over, she was absolutely peaceful again. Other kid didn't need to scream to cope with the day, but had difficulties at the same time of day.
Babies only have a single mechanism of communication and it takes a while to debug it.
Imagine you had a computer that would crash every time something went wrong. You would develop a checklist for that computer to help with debugging it. That’s the exact same thing with kids.
>IMO this is a great time of one's life to discard the illusion of control.
Became a first-time parent back in 2020, and couldn't agree more. The trend of slowly increasing personal freedom/control suddenly stops, and your freedom is reverted back to near-zero. As in, you will become completely dependent on your spouse and cannot even piss or shit alone when bubs is awake.
The best thing to do is just acknowledge that this is life now (and more than that, the type of life that human beings have evolved to live in), and the past few years of unrestrained personal freedom were a dream that you needed to wake up from.
Especially since the author has twins, and it's really easy to think you have two independent samples when you really have two very similar ones (in both genetics and shared environment)
> The […] world is chock full of people who found something that worked for them and who then made the unwarranted conclusion that it is universal truth.
FTFY. Oh wait…
If being a parent taught me anything, it's to trust my instincts - go with your gut, as the parent(s) you understand your baby better than any other parents, friends or healthcare workers.
It's a long story, but we could have saved our family a lot of grief if we knew that from the start - but of course, as first time parents it's not easy to trust your guy.
Of kids I've always thought "maybe one day". I can see how it'd be a tough, but extremely rewarding and meaningful endeavor.
But reading this article made me think for the first time "actually, I think I don't want kids."
So many "mental CPU cycles" spent learning about pregnancy, babies, why they cry, how to care for them. It just doesn't appeal to me at all - I think it'd resent it taking me away from spending time on the topics that legitimately interest me - stuff like space, technology, fiction, stocks, politics, philosophy, hobbies. (I realize how much this comes off as a young white tech nerd... But that's exactly what I am!)
And all this just of the knowledge gathering. We haven't even touched on the truly hard part - executing it!
I guess this article made raising a kid real in a way that none other have before. Took the high ideal of "raising a family" and shined light on all the tough, hard realities.
Of course this is all from my current perspective. I'm sure it all totally changes in ways I just can't conceive when it's your own kid.
Open to any insights from others who may have been here before!
Newly minted dad of twins and uncle for 5 others.
Infant phase
The work is intense when they are young since they can’t do much on their own and need help very often. But this doesn’t last for too long. Most parents exaggerate this phase since it is very intense from their otherwise happy days without kids. I had enough nephews and nieces around that I helped with so my kids are not the first time I am doing something this intense.
Toddler phase
They are very manageable because of their size. Not those helpless poor little things any more. But they need to be entertained. Having others kids help a lot here. One more reason to have more than one kids. Only kids can match kids energy level.
Beyond infants
This is when things get interesting they start engaging with you a lot with words and actions.
Most of the problems with millennials for fear of having kids got to do with not having much experience before having their own. So they get overwhelmed, this is very specific to societies with lack of communities (western urban societies).
Once your friends have kids they are out of your circle since they cannot come out and do as much as they used to do.
With medical advancements and tools available to raise a child it is lot easier to raise kids than before. Over focusing on parenthood is also another issue. This is product of abundance of time and money. My mom of 3 children didn’t have tools and time to engage with us like our generation do. She did exceptionally well without over indulging in the name of parenthood.
Note: I am leaning game development and reading books while having full time job and having twins as my first children on my own at 40.
It’s totally doable. Try being around your friends with kids, that’s helpful for them as well as you.
Most rewarding thing and easily attainable for most of us is to raise children never forget the entertainment and stress buster aspect of having kids as well.
Once a wise women from the east said to us raised in the west: If you can have pets I don’t seem to understand your issues having kids. Kids are Pets+++
I found this to be quite accurate based on my experience, and I have written things very close to this to my personal contacts that are entering this phase.
The most important thing to internalize, is that the baby is crying for a reason, and your life will go a lot better if you figure out how to solve their problem immediately, rather than ignore or get upset about it yourself. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that that their babies cry all night, expecting to find common ground in the complaint.
And to add to both the tired cry, and the witching hour, I would say that the baby wants to sleep, but needs to ascertain safety/physical comfort first, which usually means being held, and some kind of movement.
Think about evolution. Humans are migratory. The greatest danger to a primordial infant is being left behind. The solution to this is to cry until someone picks them up and carries them along the path. This crying for attention has to be more advantageous than the obvious danger of alerting predators.
This may sound controversial, initially:
Consider getting a good pair of sound isolating earphones, or even ear defenders!
Not to neglect your child; but to reduce stress levels so you can problem solve effectively.
The cry of your baby is one of the most emotionally powerful sounds there is. You'll experience extreme stress if you can't calm them down quickly. Probably for good evolutionary reasons, so the parent doesn't ignore their child.
But sometimes there's a problem you just can't instantly solve.
If you find yourself getting really stressed, and losing your ability to act effectively, being able to put something on your ears and reduce the volume while you, e.g. change the nappy/diaper, can reduce stress and help you be a better parent.
I only had to do this a handful of times for each of our kids, but when it was helpful, it was really helpful.
Two bits I’d add:
1. I printed and laminated a card listing the reasons the Baby could be crying. And tied it to the side of the crib. When you’re sleep deprived it can help to have this list available to you.
2. #7 on my list was “sometimes babies just need to cry.”
My family swore that the witching hour was consistent with the sun rising or setting. And that the fix was to be outside with the baby.
Just out of curiosity: is it common for Americans not to breastfeed?
It may seem funny but for me mentions of bottles for newborns sound so strange
We learned the hard way that baby could be colic (with increased crying during evening hours) due to intolerance to cow’s milk/soy (via mother’s milk). It took us couple of months to get there (first stopped milk products and subsequently soy) and I wish we had known earlier. I’ve been meaning to write a blog post with the hope to help someone run through these possible causes as part of diagnosing the colic crying early on.
I’m somewhat fresh from this so my only advice is:
There’s no magic tricks. Try everything. Don’t stop trying things. Something might work for you.
Every midwife and doctor always told us "every baby is different" which is infuriating when you just need some advice or reassurance, but probably accurate.
There certainly are different cries, but from experience I don't think there is a universal "language" of sounds.
As a parent you'll work it out for your kid fairly quickly. Just go down the checklist of needs and you'll work it out for each baby: hungry/thirsty, needs changing, needs attention/comfort, needs sleep.
Psst: co-sleeping won't stop babies from crying, but it makes it way easier for everybody involved to get back to sleep much faster.
Advice and rules rarely seem to apply anything but pressure to parents. The real solve is building connection to and understanding of your children. Likely this won’t come from a template - although it can be a good framework to understand the possibility space and have ideas. Expect to try variations, and don’t ignore the pressure of ‘perfection’.
The only statement I’ve found true is: Whatever is hard now will go away - but it will be replaced with something harder. Parenting is a grind. Love your kids especially when it’s hard, learn your emotional responses and hang ups, let go of perfect.
I had twin daughters in 2019 and was given 3 months of paternity leave, and I don’t know how we would have survived without it. I did a 12 hour shift at night, and fed them and changed their diaper on a schedule (every 2 hours iirc)
This reduced a lot of the whining because they were always clean. I also had a swing to put them in when they were upset, and that handled most of those issues. Overall it was tedious but not very stressful because I could do it full time.
Anyway establishing a consistent routine really helped me. I wouldn’t wait until they’re starting to get fussy over something if it can be avoided.
This is a great article covering the basic "tricks", that might work in many cases. Babies are still always individual having some things that only work for them (like a hairdryer calms them down) and some general tricks, that don't. Even in the same family their brothers and sisters might behave totally different.
I enjoyed reading Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, 10th [1], which goes a lot more into detail about these basics and health, while still mentioning, that only some things might work and that there is not a silver bullet.
In my expierience, it was a lot like in this article. What also often worked out, if nothing else does: Getting into the car and driving around the block leads to sleeping.
I think the most important part at that age is being there for your child. A trick that worked for us and might sound strange: Breastfeeding till the age of 2 or 3 seems to be the best that can happen to the immune system and giving your child to nursery before reaching 2 1/2 seems to be not a good idea. Our daugther has no allergies and intolerances. As well the obvious stuff also worked, like healthy food (vegetables, no sugar), being outside and moving as much as possible and letting her go sometimes, but that comes later on.
[1] https://www.amazon.de/Spocks-Baby-Child-Care-10th/dp/1501175...
To soothe the baby the author forgot:
1) pacifier. Holy hell those things are life savers. As my kid got older he would sometimes lose the pacifier in his sleep and start crying. We just bought 10 of them and sprinkled them theoughout his crib at night
2) driving. Driving your kid around will often soothe them. I had a particular route I would take down the highway that would guarantee put him to sleep.
Since I didn't see this mentioned in the article or the comments:
Checking for temperature is pretty easy. If their neck is a bit sweaty, they're too warm, remove a layer.
If their feet or hands feel colder than usual, too cold, add a layer (maybe warm on them on your own body first, if practical).
(This assumes a healthy baby).
> 2.4 Bright Lights at Night
This is somewhat inaccurate. Babies only start producing melatonin around the third month - until then their sleep patterns aren't necessarily correlated with the time of the day.
Bright lights in general obviously prevent them from going to sleep.
I'm sure everyone is different, but for us, basically all crying was solved by just nursing for a bit (obviously a diaper change is different).
After 6 or 9 months they get genuinely bored and nursing isn't a fix-all... but it's really a fix-most.
Great write-up. Great reading if you're a dad to be. But don't fret, if you don't get a chance to read something like this, eventually you learn all the nuances of child rearing in due course while you're on the job.
Thank all you parents for the work that you do raising the next generation. It must be soooo difficult.
When I read articles like this, I feel an intense anger and disgust for the children. I rationally know it’s not their fault; they’re helpless and didn’t choose this. When I have had to care for a child in distress, I don’t have the feeling. It’s only when I read about it or hear a neighbor’s child wailing. Maybe it reflects some neglect I experienced. Regardless, it is one of the many reasons I don’t have kids.
But anyway, thanks to those of you who can manage it. Somebody needs to raise the people who will be changing my diapers soon enough.
At four months old my infant was crying because, and I kid you not, she wanted me to take her to the kitchen and hold her up where she could watch mom cooking. How do I know this? Because she would do nothing but cry until, by accident, I went to say something to mom in the kitchen and instantly the infant stopped crying and stayed happily quiet for about 15 minutes thereafter. Who knew that four month old infants are thinking things like that?
Do the infants (less than a year) sleep automatically as in, you put them down on bed when they are tired and they go to sleep by themselves? Or do you have to make them sleep with lullabies, holding in arms, rocking them, humming, white noise, on your belly, etc etc until they finally fall asleep?
My 7mo son slept all by himself only twice in his lifetime. I wonder if everyone has to make their babies sleep like we do or they sleep by themselves.
Bottle feeding infants is a tragedy as it deprives them of an essential emotional experience they are intended to receive. Also, breast milk has miraculous healing properties and immune support functions.
While we're on the topic, breast milk can be squirted on wounds or irritated tissues for instant relief.
I encourage everyone to disregard this article completely. A parent gets to know their baby’s cries naturally and instinctively. There’s no need to use cheats from some other parent’s experiences that really have a little value to the distinctiveness of your own child.
I found this video quite useful and accurate for the first few months, maybe up to 6 month or so at least.
not sure how it works with twins quantity wise, but I see "bottle" being mentioned for the 3 mo babies - afaik best to get mother's milk as much as possible in the first 6 months
Rising baby right now, every tip was familiar, yes we go trough debugging baby cries too. I would only add - white noise. Sometimes it helps soothe baby.
Having a baby teaches you to put up with more shit. Literally and figuratively.
Oh also, whatever worked last week probably doesn’t work this week. :)
I find the gender distribution of kids in my friends circle is lately hugely skewed towards female. Any one else?
1. Hold me.
2. Feed me.
3. Dirty diaper.
You knew exactly what my first child needed by how she cried.
123 comments about "why babies cry" on the first page!!!!!??
The solution is always one of 3 things: feed, burp, change diaper
I'm terrified.