Читать книгу The Fussy Baby Book: Parenting your high-need child from birth to five - Martha Sears - Страница 55

A mother is biologically programmed to give a nurturant response to her newborn’s cries and not to restrain herself. Fascinating biological changes take place in a mother’s body in response to her infant’s cry. Upon hearing her baby cry, the blood flow to a mother’s breasts increases, accompanied by a biological urge to “pick up and feed”. The act of breast-feeding itself causes a surge in prolactin, a hormone that we feel forms the biological basis of the term “mother’s intuition”. Oxytocin, the hormone that causes a mother’s milk to let down, brings feelings of relaxation and pleasure, a pleasant release from the tension built up by the baby’s cry. These feelings help you love your baby. Mothers, listen to the biological cues of your body when your baby cries rather than to advisers who would tell you to turn a deaf ear. These biological happenings explain why it’s easy for those advisers to say such a thing. They are not biologically connected to your baby. Nothing happens to their hormones when your baby cries.

Each baby’s signal is unique. A baby’s cry is a baby’s language, and each baby cries differently. Voice researchers call these unique sounds “cry prints”, which are as unique for babies as their fingerprints are.

Once you appreciate the special signal value of your baby’s cry, the important thing is what you do about it. You have two basic options: ignore or respond. Ignoring your baby’s cry is usually a lose-lose situation. A more compliant baby gives up and stops signalling, becomes withdrawn, eventually realizes that crying is not worthwhile, and concludes that he himself is not worthwhile either. The baby loses the motivation to communicate with his parents, and the parents miss out on opportunities to get to know their baby. Everyone loses. A baby with a more persistent personality does not give up so easily. Instead, he cries more loudly and keeps escalating his signal, making it more and more disturbing. You could ignore this persistent signal in several ways. You could wait until the baby stops crying and then pick him up, so that he won’t think it was his crying that got your attention. This is actually a type of power struggle; you teach the baby that you’re in control, but you also teach him that he has no power to communicate. This shuts down parent-child communication, and in the long run everybody loses.

You could desensitize yourself completely so that you won’t be “bothered” at all by the cry; this way you can teach baby he gets responded to only when it’s “time”. Also, according to this scenario, baby gets used to being in a constant state of want. Not feeling right becomes the norm to be re-created throughout his life. This is another lose-lose situation; baby doesn’t get what he needs, and parents remain stuck in a mind-set that doesn’t allow them to enjoy the baby’s unique personality. Or you could pick baby up to calm him but then put him right back down because “it’s not time to feed him yet”. He has to learn, after all, to be happy “on his own”. Lose-lose again; he will start to cry again and you will feel angry. He will learn that his desires make you angry. And he will learn his communication, though heard, has not been understood, which can lead him to learn to distrust his own perceptions (“Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m not hungry”).

Your other option is to give a prompt and nurturant response. This is the win-win way for baby and mother to work out a communication system that helps them both. The mother responds promptly and sensitively so that baby will feel less frantic the next time he needs something. The baby learns to cry “better”, in a less disturbing way, since he knows mother will come. Mother structures baby’s environment so that there is less need for him to cry; she keeps him close to her if she knows he’s tired and ready to sleep. Mother also heightens her sensitivity to the cry so that she can give just the right response: a quick response when the baby is young and prone to fall apart easily or when the cry makes it clear there is real danger, a slower response when the baby is older and can begin to learn to settle the disturbance on his own.

Responding appropriately to your baby’s cry is the first and one of the most difficult of many communication challenges you will face as a mother. You will master the system only after rehearsing thousands of cue-response cycles in the early months. If you initially regard your baby’s cry as a signal to be responded to and evaluated rather than as an unfortunate habit to be broken, you will open yourself up to becoming an expert in your baby’s signals, which will carry over into becoming an expert on everything about your baby. Each mother-baby signal system is unique. That’s why it is so short-sighted for “sleep trainers” to prescribe canned cry-response formulas, such as “leave her to cry for five minutes the first night, ten minutes the second”, and so on.