“This is not how I imagined it. I pictured sitting in the rocking chair with a blissful pink-cheeked baby.... My child is always miserable and he tortures me nonstop with his relentless cries.”

Dramatic? Not necessarily. A miserable baby makes parents “crazy.” Hashem designed the cries of an infant to be annoying enough to signal the need for urgent intervention. After all the little guys can’t just say what they want. Hashem made sure that they would be heard. A baby’s cry sends off an alarm to every man woman and child! But sometimes parents cannot find the “off button” and the baby continues to cry for hours. It’s during these times that parents feel desperate.

What’s Happening?

“Thank goodness my baby doesn’t have colic — I wouldn’t be able to take it. In fact I don’t let my baby cry for even a few minutes because it breaks my heart to hear her sobs. I try to keep her near me at all times so that I can respond to her needs even before she utters them.”

Some people have a very low threshold when it comes to tolerating infant distress. Any cry — not just a long hard one — is intolerable to them.

“Crying is a baby’s way of saying he needs something. If I ignore my baby I’m essentially telling him that I don’t care: I know you’re completely helpless — you can’t get your food or warmed up or cleaned up you can’t even move without someone’s help — but hey I just don’t care! What sort of message is that? I just think about how I would feel if I found myself paralyzed in a hospital bed in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language and the only thing I could do was shout ‘help’ in English. How would I feel if everyone ignored me? How long would it take me to completely shut down inside?”

Other people don’t take the tears of babies that seriously.

“I can’t be at the baby’s beck and call all day — I have other kids and other responsibilities. It’s not the end of the world if she cries. Soon she’ll realize no one is coming and she’ll go to sleep. Believe me she’s very well cared for and deeply loved. Babies cry that’s all there is to it.”

There have always been different opinions about the meaning of a baby’s cry. It’s been attributed not only to primitive attempts at communication but also to exercising the lungs releasing gas experiencing pain or sensitivities having colic having a certain kind of temperament and so on.

No one knows for sure whether ignoring a baby’s cries for certain periods of time makes any difference in long-term development. There are just too many confounding factors. For instance the parenting style of a parent who can ignore the cries may be different in many ways from the parenting style of a parent who can’t and it might be these differences that affect the developmental outcome rather than the crying issue itself.

In addition “responding” and “not responding” immediately can affect different babies in different ways. There are those who inheriting a bunch of depression and/or anxiety genes might have strong negative reactions to being ignored for short periods while those with more resilient genes might be unaffected.

Having said this anthropological research in the 1980s showed that babies who are responded to immediately during their first year of life cry much less during subsequent years. There is also subsequent research that points to aversive effects of prolonged crying such as increased aggressiveness more ADHD poorer school performance poorer social behavior brain changes that increase anxiety and depression increased cortisol lower growth-hormone levels and other negative effects. While researchers suggest that these effects are due to the baby’s brain being routinely flooded with stress hormones during episodes of crying it is also possible that other factors are at play as described above.

Soothing Babies

Sometimes it isn’t possible to stop a baby from crying. However providing comfort to a distressed person of any age is always beneficial. Just because a woman in labor is in pain is no reason for her midwife to abandon her! Similarly just because the baby cannot stop sobbing is no reason for parents to leave him or her in isolation.

However there is only so much that a parent can do. A parent must always leave herself enough energy to take care of the entire family not just one crying baby. Therefore every mother must decide for herself — based on her own parenting philosophy personality health and energy levels — how to balance her needs the baby’s needs and the family’s needs. There is no one-size-fits-all way to deal with crying babies but deal with it we must.