t’s a sound that you’ve heard all your life - though not quite like this before. A baby crying - not particularly unusual. But when it’s your baby crying, this common, everyday sound you’ve heard throughout your life in the form of background noise or mild annoyance suddenly elevates to the status of language.
Responding appropriately to your baby's cry is one of the most difficult communication challenges you will face as a new parent. You will master the system only after rehearsing thousands of cue-responses in the early months. If you initially regard your baby's cry as a signal to be responded to and evaluated rather than an inconvenient habit to be broken, you will open yourself up to becoming an expert in your baby's signals and pave the way for a strong line of communication between you and your child.
The Perfect Signal
Pediatric researchers have long appreciated that the sound of an infant's cry has all three features of a perfect signal: it’s automatic, appropriately disturbing, and adjustable.
A newborn cries by reflex - the baby senses a need, has no idea what to do (doesn’t even know what an idea is), and responds immediately by sounding the alarm. There is no smoke detector or car alarm in the world with this kind of reliability. Time for food? Let out a big cry. Wet diaper chafing at your privates? Let’s hear that cry. Time for some more attention? Just cry! A baby’s cry is easily generated - once his lungs are full of air, he can initiate crying with very little effort. And it quickly becomes his trusty role of gaffer’s tape - it will fix just about anything.
The baby's cry is also a perfectly designed sound - ear-piercing enough to get mom and dad’s attention and make them want to stop the cry, but not so disturbing as to make them want to run out of the house clutching a bottle of Xanax (at least for the first hour).
What really makes the baby cry’s design impressive, though, is its malleability. The signal can be modified with increasing precision as both sender and receiver learn the language of timbre shifts, pitch changes, rhythm, and dynamics. What begins exclusively as “Red Alert! I don’t know what’s going on, but you better get in here and fix it pronto!” evolves into “May I trouble you for a warm bottle of milk?”
Voice researchers have found that each baby’s cry is unique. They call these sounds “cry prints,” which are as individual for babies as their fingerprints. So unless you plan on using a device like the Baby Crying Analyzer (yes, this really exists), you will have to tune in and be patient just like the rest of us.
Biologically Correct
Responding to baby's cries is instinctive. A mother is biologically programmed to give a nurturing 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 the call, the blood flow to a mother's breasts increases, accompanied by a biological urge to pick up and nurse. The act of breastfeeding itself causes a surge in prolactin, a hormone that some researchers believe 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 release from the tension built up by the baby's cry.
Dads don’t get to participate in the prolactin/oxytocin rush, but I do have a friend who said he could actually feel his temperature rise when his child started crying. Maybe it was the early onset of “Oh-no-not-another-sleepless-night anxiety,” but there’s an undeniable connection for fathers, too.
