from Our Babies, Ourselves, p. 146

In more affluent Western industrialized nations, parents assume crying is first and foremost linked to hunger. In fact, some women in these cultures often end breast-feeding and turn to bottle-feeding because they believe excessive crying by the baby means he is not getting enough nourishment from the breast. But researchers know that early crying has a broader range of functions. It can be stopped by various methods, and food is not always the solution. In the 1960s, an era in America when parents were advised to let babies cry, Wolff ran a series of experiments to figure out just why these kids were so unhappy. He tried a pacifier to determine if oral gratification, without nourishment, would calm a screaming baby. It worked. He next tested a series of newborns with wet diapers. Wolff put clean diapers on half and put the wet diapers back on the other half. Both groups were quieted and didn’t seem to care if the diaper was wet or not. Wolff concluded that babies simply like the stimulation and physical sensation of being changed. He then questioned the idea that babies cry when they are cold, and so placed some infants in cribs heated to 88 degrees and others in cribs set 10 degrees cooler. Those in the cooler cribs cried more frequently, indicating that warmth, too, can reduce crying. Wolff investigated this notion further by layering some babies in clothes, covering others in various positions with blankets, and lightly swaddling others. Their reactions varied; some cried when covered tightly, others liked it tight. Finally Wolff tried the classic parental response to a crying baby. Using a group of crying babies who had to be artificially fed by tubes into their abdomens for medical reasons, he fed them this way until their stomachs were full and waited to see if satisfying their hunger would quiet them. Surprisingly, a full stomach did not stop these infants from wailing. Wolff also discovered that simply picking them up worked perfectly well as a cry-stopper, even if they were hungry and waiting to be fed. In general, he concluded picking up a baby, giving it a pacifier, or feeding it — not for the nutritional value but for the physical contact — worked best.

As most parents intuitively know, crying is not just a signal of hunger. Even in newborns, it communicates much more — the need for touch seems to be especially important; and clearly a crying baby is announcing its internal state and calling for some sort of change.

I love this book, it just has so much evidence inside. And I love the image of this man, Wolff, running around in the warm dark with 20 babies, sticking pacifiers in their mouths and putting their soaking wet diapers back on. I know it must have been more scientific than that, but really it feels like something out of a story, some strange story where a man is trying to get all these babies to stop crying and learns at last that they just want to be held.

January 29th, 2010 | Category: overheard | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL