Babycalming: Simple Solutions for a Happy Baby

Introduction – Why the Three-step Plan Works

After all the anticipation during pregnancy, when your baby finally arrives, no matter how organized you are, life will feel pretty chaotic amidst the excitement and wonder. New parents in particular are thrown straight in at the deep-end – after all, your baby doesn’t come with a handy manual – and the sense of responsibility can be overwhelming.

What You Need

Like most people, you are probably used to running your life with one eye on the clock and the other on the task in hand: you have a routine and normally expect to do certain things in a certain order throughout the day. Because of this, it is natural to hope that your baby will fall into a routine that will complement yours and enable you to plan and manage your day-to-day life.

At the same time, you also hope that your baby will be happy, feed easily and sleep well. If he cries, you would like what he needs to be obvious, so that you can know how to respond. However, many babies do not appear to behave like this: they cry seemingly without reason, they sleep in fits and starts or they want to feed all the time. They don’t seem to have an internal clock and they show no interest in the clock on the wall!

What Your Baby Needs

Your baby spent his first nine months being held, rocked and moved around in the womb. He was in constant contact with his mum and could hear her heartbeat, her voice, feel the warmth of her body and the sensation of being tightly held. He expected things to continue like this after birth: being in constant contact with another human being, feeling warm, snug and secure. If he thinks has been abandoned, he cries, a response that has evolved over millions of years to make sure a responsible adult picks him up and keeps him safe. If he is hungry, uncomfortable, tired or bored he will cry.

How to Help Your Baby

A psychologist called Maslow pointed out that in order for human beings to be fulfilled, reach their potential and enjoy life – ‘reach self-actualization’ is how he put it – they need to have their basic needs met. You can’t sit and concentrate on a book or film if you are hungry, thirsty or need the toilet. Great philosophy or art will pass you by if you are homeless and worried about your safety.

Babies are like this, too – if their basic needs are not met, they cannot be happy and secure, and although there are lots of similarities between adult needs and baby needs, there are differences, too.

We all need to have enough to eat and drink, and we need to have times to rest and sleep. We all need to feel safe – for grown-ups this might mean that the rent or mortgage is paid or that our homes are secure and we can sleep soundly at night – but for your baby, feelings about safety are a little different. Babies expect adults to fend off danger, so for your baby, safety is about human companionship. If there is a reliable grown-up nearby, then he can relax.

For your baby to feel happy and contented, you need to fulfil his three basic needs:

• Contact

• Food

• Sleep

Over time, the way you meet these needs, and the balance between them, changes. This is perhaps one of the most difficult things to grasp in parenting – the rules change all the time, and what worked today will no longer be appropriate tomorrow. Where we often go wrong is in thinking that methods stay constant.

For instance, feeding a baby whenever he is hungry, day or night, is perfectly appropriate at two weeks, but is no longer appropriate at two years. Sharing your bedroom, if not your bed, with a baby of five weeks is safe and easy; sharing your bed with a five-year-old is less easy; sharing your bed with a fifteen-year-old would certainly be odd! Responding the instant your baby cries when he is little is appropriate; responding to a toddler who is yelling for sweets is not kind in the long run.

Every healthy baby wants to communicate, will make demands and will make his presence felt. Initially, the only way he knows how to get your attention is by crying. In general, if you understand and work within his needs, he will not need to cry for prolonged periods and you and he will enjoy plenty of positive and happy times together.

This does not mean endless self-sacrifice on your behalf: normally, your needs and your baby’s needs will not fundamentally conflict, because nature has designed a system that works in harmony with you both.

What This Book Can Do for You

This book is fundamentally different from the many other parenting books on the shelves. Some books cast you loose, tell you to trust your instincts and leave you to get on with it. If anything, they hope that if you respond to your baby all the time without question, he will eventually just evolve into the kind of child that you would like him to be. Most parents need more reassurance and guidance than that.

Other books – and this is a more popular approach at the moment – impose on your baby a rigid schedule from the day he is born. However, unless this particular schedule happens to suit you and your baby, you are probably both going to be unhappy with it. If it does work for you, the chances are that this is the schedule or routine you would both have arrived at anyway!

Then there is a third way, a middle way, which is to understand your baby’s needs, respond to them appropriately, and to introduce the routines and boundaries your child wants – but at the right times and in a way that does not fundamentally conflict with your own needs. Babycalming follows this third way and shows you what is appropriate and when. It is a three-step plan based on your baby’s three basic needs for contact, food and sleep, and it will also help you to devise and settle into a routine that is right for you both.

It is a combination of tried-and-tested methods from my experience as an NCT (National Childbirth Trust) breastfeeding counsellor and mother of three, and research-based evidence.

Throughout the book you will find quotations from different experts, philosophers and public figures regarding children and childcare over the last couple of centuries. They are quoted at the beginning of each chapter, then at the end you will find out when it was said. You will see that some opinions on childcare haven’t changed at all, whereas others will seem completely inappropriate. They are there to remind you that opinions on childcare change all the time, and that as a parent you can only do what you think is best for your baby at the present time according to all the information and advice you have at that moment.

With this in mind, try not to worry or feel guilty if you find it overwhelming being a parent, or if you are unsure that you are doing the right thing for your baby. Instead, enjoy your baby, celebrate his presence in your life and know that if you can meet his three basic needs for contact, food, and sleep, you will be well on the way to bringing up a happy and contented baby.

1 Why Do Babies Cry?

~ Times change – does the advice stay the same? ~

At no previous time has there been such a wide general interest in all that concerns childhood, as shown by the numerous books constantly issuing from the press upon these subjects and the periodicals devoted to the different phases of the child problem.

Most people can ignore all sorts of noise – the buzz of conversations, engine noises, even the radio or TV – but the instant a baby starts crying, everyone looks tense. They need it to stop.

Your baby’s appearance is designed to make you want to take care of him; he has a smooth, round forehead, big eyes, a head that’s large in proportion to his body – in all mammals this signals, ‘I’m a baby – take care of me!’ In the same way, the sound of your baby’s crying is designed to make sure you attend to him – now! We all react to the sound of a baby’s cry with increased heart rate, raised blood pressure and sweating – the common reactions to stress. A baby’s cry is meant to be stressful, to evoke an instant response.

How Easy Is It to Tell Why Your Baby Is Crying?

Mothers quickly become tuned in to their own baby’s crying, so well in fact that after only three nights in a postnatal ward, a new mother can pick out her own baby’s cries in her sleep.1

However, although you will quickly learn to identify your own baby’s cry, it’s not like a language where such-and-such a cry means, ‘I’m hungry!’ while another cry means, ‘I’m bored!’ With most babies, what varies is only the intensity and volume of their cry, rather than its tone or content, though as your baby gets older he will be more sophisticated at letting you know what he wants.

We know this from research. In one study, researchers played two tapes to mothers: one was of a one-month-old hungry baby, the other was of a newborn baby who’d just been circumcised. When the mothers were asked whether the babies were hungry, sleepy, in pain, angry, startled or wet, only 25 per cent could correctly identify the hungry baby (40 per cent thought he was over-tired), while for the other tape, only 40 per cent could identify the pain cry correctly, with 30 per cent thinking he was startled or angry2 Another piece of research, from Finland, asked 80 very experienced baby nurses to listen to recordings of babies crying. Once again, even with their experience, they were correct only 50 per cent of the time.3

Some researchers have tried analysing babies’ cries using acoustical measuring equipment. People like Barry Lester at Brown University have found that a baby’s cry may be significantly different when he has certain medical conditions; for instance, a malnourished baby has a weaker cry, while babies with cri-du-chat, a chromosome disorder, also have a distinctive cry. However, apart from these unusual examples, it seems impossible to classify the average baby’s cry as a precise language.

DID YOU KNOW?

– babies know more about crying than you do!

Researchers played tape-recordings of crying babies to newborns, and discovered that at birth they could distinguish their own cries from those of other babies. Hearing another newborn baby cry was also likely to start ‘sympathy’ crying in these listening newborns, but they were not disturbed by computer-simulated cries, a crying baby chimpanzee or even a crying, five-month-old baby.4

This does not mean it’s not worth trying to understand your baby’s cries! In time you probably will get to know what your baby wants, not by interpreting his cry, but by coming to know who he is, what he likes, and of course by the context: whether he has been fed recently, needs a sleep, and so on.

How the Three-step Plan Will Help

The three steps are a great way to start thinking about responding appropriately to your baby’s crying. Over time, as you grow in confidence, and as you and your baby get to know each other and to learn to communicate, you will begin to learn what is wrong without any help from other people.

Am I Spoiling My Baby by Picking Him Up When He Cries?

Some people believe that picking a baby up when he cries, teaches him to cry, and this view is at the heart of many sleep programmes, as you will see later in this book. But while there is a stage at which a baby can be encouraged to fall asleep alone, a newborn who is left to cry will not feel loved and secure, just abandoned. Tiny babies are incapable of comprehending why they might have to wait, but if your baby knows his needs will be met when he cries, he will learn that he is not alone – he is loved, he can influence the world, and the world in turn is dependable (all important lessons).

Tuning In to Your Baby’s Needs

Take the time to tune in to your baby and find out what he wants. You will not only have a happier baby and a good relationship, you will be encouraging his development!

Barry Lester worked with one-month-old babies, taping their cries and playing them back to their mothers, asking what was wrong.5 He found that the babies whose mothers could interpret their cries correctly, had higher mental scores at 18 months of age and had learnt 2½ times as many words as babies whose mothers had not tuned in to their babies’ cries.

‘If the mother can read her baby’s cues she is more likely to be providing the kind of child-rearing environment that will enrich development and facilitate cognition later on,’ Lester says.6

Try to remember that most babies have fairly simple needs – the need to be touched, held and fed, the need to be comfortable, the need to feel safe, the need for human company and the need to sleep. They cry to let someone know there is a problem, and all they expect is that someone will deal with the problem. Your baby won’t cry to annoy you, ‘get at’ you, or from any other complicated motive. Try to avoid projecting your own feelings onto your baby when interpreting why he’s crying.

As he grows, you can encourage him to use other methods of communication by interpreting his cries verbally: ‘Oh, you want a drink, do you?’ If you are calm when he is agitated, he will begin to learn to calm himself and regain control. As he reaches his toddler years he is going to need to learn about ‘deferred gratification’, so not responding instantly to screams will do an older baby no harm, as you will see later on in this book.

Why Your Baby Might Be Crying

• Listen to your gut feeling – what do you think your baby needs? You are probably the best person to know.

Step One: Feeding

In the first few weeks, most mothers try feeding first. Suckling is comforting, and you cannot overfeed a breastfed baby. If you are formula feeding, you need to keep an eye on the amount your baby consumes in 24 hours, but if you’re mixing feeds correctly and staying within the recommended amounts, you will not overfeed your baby.

If he is opening his mouth and turning his head (‘rooting’), this is a good indication that he’s hungry, so you can begin to look for these cues, and feed him even before he starts crying. We will look at why baby-led feeding is important, especially with breastfeeding, in the section on Step One, as well as looking at other ways of fulfilling your baby’s need to suckle.

Step Two: Comfort

IS HE COMFORTABLE?

Check his nappy. Feel his abdomen to find whether he’s too cold or hot. Is he in pain? If he is in pain, he will probably not stop crying even when you pick him up, and his crying will be intense; high-pitched, with breath-holding in the middle – although, as we have seen earlier, it’s not possible to be exact about the meaning of a particular type of cry. However, if you are at all worried, do ring your GP.

IS HE BORED?

If you’ve eliminated obvious physical discomfort, then your baby may be frightened, lonely or bored; i.e., in need of human company for comfort! In this case he will probably stop crying when you pick him up. You will find lots of suggestions for soothing a crying baby later on in the section on Step Two.

Paediatrician Berry Brazelton suggests that you don’t rush straight in but watch instead to see whether your baby can soothe himself. He suggests six things to try in turn. First, show your baby your face to see if that reassures him. Then, speak gently to see if face and voice alone can soothe. The next method to try is a warm hand laid gently on his tummy; then try both hands to contain his arms and legs. If none of these manages to calm your baby, pick him up. It can be good to hold him in a position which makes him feel safe and secure (see page 79) or to wrap him up securely with access to his knuckles or fingers so that he can suck them (see page 79). Sucking is the most soothing thing for a baby.7

Step Three: Sleep

Is he tired? Babies are not skilled at getting themselves to sleep, and can cry through tiredness. Your baby will need lots of sleep to help him grow and learn, and there is information about ways of helping your baby to sleep in the section on Step Three, as well as how your baby’s need for sleep can dovetail with yours, so you and your family get all the sleep you need.

My second baby wanted to be held a lot when he was little, and my first was just aged 20 months at the time and wanting mummy too. So I bought a second-hand baby sling from a friend and ‘wore’ my newborn on my front for the first couple of weeks. It kept him quiet and content and left me free to get on with everything else.

– Sonia, mother of Anna, Ricky and Jessica

~ Times Change ~ Answer – 1899 ~

Dr Holt, author of the bestselling The Care and Feeding of Children, addressing the third annual convention of the National Congress of Mothers in Washington DC, mid-February 1899