All babies cry. They can’t talk, they can’t use hand signals, they can’t move away from a situation they’re not happy about, so they cry.

When Jack, our first baby, came home from hospital, Pete, would get very distressed about Jack’s crying. During those first few months Jack seemed to have the ability to cry, cry, cry, gasp and then cry, cry, cry again for hours on end. Pete felt like Jack was crying at him, that Jack was mad at him or had taken an instant dislike to his own father. The idea of a tiny newborn baby being outraged at his father may sound ludicrous. But when your baby is spending hours every day in the crying, crying, crying gasp routine and you haven’t had a full night’s sleep for a week, the theory that your baby has a personal vendetta against you sounds reasonable.

It made such a difference to Pete when I told him that crying was the only way babies could communicate with the world. He then understood that Jack wasn’t mad at him; Jack was just crying. Crying was the only way he could tell us he was hungry, or he had a bellyache, or he was cold, or he had done a big poo in his nappy and wanted it changed. He would cry if he had been lying too long on one side in his cot, with his arm stuck underneath him tingling with pins and needles. Imagine how many different things babies want to tell us in those first few months of life.

A baby’s cry is designed to get under your skin. It is designed to make you react, to make you want to stop the crying, to find out what’s wrong and fix it. It’s part of the human survival strategy. If babies gooed and gaahed and smiled all day, how would we know when they needed to be fed or when their nappies needed changing?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Sarah's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.