Crying: Our Babies' Ancient Survival Tool

The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer
By Harvey Karp, M.D.

(Page 2 of 3)

Main points:

• The Crying Reflex: Your baby's brilliant attention-getting tool

• How a baby's crying can make a parent feel

• Do different baby cries have different meanings? Some babies scream even for little problems.

At delivery, your baby's powerful wails are a welcome sign that you've given birth to a healthy child. However, if after the first week or two, your infant continues to scream, his crying may become the last thing that you want to hear! But, we should be grateful for our baby's crying - it's one of their most wonderful abilities.

During the first few months of life, your baby will have no problem getting by without the foggiest idea of how to smile or talk, but he would be in terrible danger if he couldn't call out to you. Getting your attention is so important that your newborn can cry from the minute his head popped out of you. This great ability is called the "crying" reflex.

The Crying Reflex: Nature's Brilliant Solution
for Getting a Cavewoman's Attention!

"A baby's cry... cries to be turned off."

Peter Ostwald, Soundmaking: The Acoustic Communication of Emotion (1963)

My guess is that millions of years ago, a Stone Age baby accidentally was born with a perfect way of getting his mother to come to him - screaming. Even if he yelped just because he had the hiccups or had scared himself, his mom appeared in seconds.

Other baby animals also need to get their mother's attention quickly, but they would never scream for it. Loud crying could be fatal for a young rabbit or monkey, because the sound might reveal his location to a hungry lion. For this reason, modern kittens meekly meow for help, squirrel monkeys beep softly if they fall out of a tree, and baby gorillas barely whimper when they need their moms.

Baby humans, on the other hand, gave up such caution a long time ago.

Whenever they needed their cavemom's attention, they wailed! Perhaps such brash, demanding babies were safe because their parents were able to fight off dangerous animals. Or perhaps a powerful cry was the only sound that could carry far enough for a baby's mom to hear him while working or chatting with friends outside the cave. Some scientists even believe successive generations of babies began to shriek louder and louder because such noisy infants received more food and attention to keep them quiet, and thus were more likely to survive.

We may never know exactly when or how ancient human babies learned to cry, yet it's clear that the cave babies, who survived and passed their genes on to us, were those who could "raise a ruckus".

Your baby's shrill cry is powerful enough to yank you out of bed or hoist you off the toilet with your pants down. (Not bad for a ten-pound weakling!) However, it is a mistake to think your baby is crying because he's trying to call you for help. During the first few months, trying to get your attention is the furthest thing from your crying baby's mind. In fact, the amazing truth is your baby has absolutely no idea he's even sending you a message.

When you hear your two-week-old scream, you're not getting a communication from him; rather you're accidentally eavesdropping on his conversation... with himself.

His cries are like agitated complaints he's muttering to himself, "Gosh, I'm hungry." or "Boy, I'm cold." Since you're right next to him, you hear his grumbles and want to lovingly respond, "What's the matter sweetheart? You sound upset."

from Chapter 3

The Dreaded Colic: A "CRYsis" for the whole family

Main points:

• What is colic?
• The top ten ancient theories about colic
• The Colic Clues: Ten universal facts about colic
• Today's top five colic theories

"The sound of a crying baby is just about the most disturbing, demanding,
shattering noise we can hear. In the baby's crying there is no future or past
only now. There is no appeasement, no negotiations possible, no reasonableness."

Sheila Kitzinger, The Crying Baby

Waaaa ...waaaa ... waaaaaa ... WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

The word infant derives from Latin and means "without a voice".

However, many colicky babies wail so powerfully that their parents think a better name for them would be mega-fants or rant-fants!

There's no doubt that colicky infants can cry louder and longer than any adult! We would drop from exhaustion after five minutes of full-out screaming, but these little cuties can go and go, with the tenacity of the Energizer bunny.

The word colic derives from the Greek word, kolikos, meaning "large intestine or colon". In ancient Greece, parents believed that intestinal pain caused their babies' crying. (While a gas twinge may start a baby's screaming fit, at other times these very same babies have gas and noisy stomachs yet they don't even make a peep. More on this in Chapter 4.)

All babies have short periods of crying that usually last for a few minutes, totaling about a half hour a day. These babies settle quickly once fed, picked up or carried. However, once colicky babies start their frantic screaming, they can yell, on and off, for hours.

Excerpted from The Happiest Baby on the Block by Harvey Karp, M.D. Copyright © 2002 by Harvey Karp. M.D.. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Harvey Karp, M.D., has perfected his approach to crying babies during his twenty-five years of experience as a pediatrician and child development specialist. Trained by some of America's top pediatricians, including Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, in 1981 Dr. Karp received the prestigious Ehrmann Fellowship to study crying and colic. Dr. Karp is an assistant professor of pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine, with a private practice in Santa Monica. He is also a nationally renowned expert on children's health and the environment and an authority on breastfeeding. He lives with his wife and daughter in California.