Читать книгу The Fussy Baby Book: Parenting your high-need child from birth to five - Martha Sears - Страница 68

The feeling that you want to shake your baby is a red flag, signalling a need for immediate help. Sometimes the ear-shattering shrieks of a hurting, colicky baby can stretch a parent to the point of irrational anger when the parent just wants to “shake it out of him”. Angrily shaking baby’s fragile brain and spinal structures can cause permanent, sometimes fatal, damage. Cry-sis (now called Serene) operates a hotline for parents to call if they feel themselves reaching this point. 020 7474 5011.

Show baby a sweeter sound. Give baby a sound he likes to hear better than his own cry. Crying quickly becomes self-perpetuating – the more loudly baby cries, the more he is driven to cry. By interrupting a cry long enough to get eye contact you can help him stop. To calm a high-need baby you need to come up with a wide repertoire of sounds. As soon as your infant starts crying, begin humming, singing, whistling, talking nonsense, whatever loud or soft voice or facial contortion catches your baby’s attention mid-cry and prompts him to listen to you. Gesturing and whispering “Shhhh” is unlikely to mute a melodramatic crier. Yet this “shush” sound repeated rhythmically over and over resembles the sound of uterine blood flow and, once you get baby’s attention, may be a familiar sound that soothes.

Don’t expect competing sounds to mellow your baby’s cry every time, but it is good practice to get an early start teaching baby which sounds trigger pleasant responses. Crying babies often turn into whiny toddlers, and you can call on the ear-pleasing sounds learned in babyhood to improve the audio quality of the toddler’s communication. Give your toddler the message “I don’t respond to whining” by telling him, “Let mummy hear your big boy voice, and then we’ll go out and play.” The earlier you begin practising these voice lessons, the more likely they are to work.