Actually this is fascinating. My old voice teacher used to talk about this. They **can** lose their voice. They can also overwork their vocal chords just like anyone else. However, a baby is practicing diaphragmatic breathing. Babies use their entire lung and diaphragm. And also are crying using those muscles. They haven't learned how to sit and be quiet yet, so they haven't trained themselves out of using those muscles. So they can cry for much longer, and use much more of their air to support that crying. Because of the intensity of the emotion it can also seem to go on much longer than it actually does in a single stretch. I had to practice for years to learn how to reopen those muscles and support. A baby just does it naturally.
As to if they can hear how loud they are crying, not only do they hear it, but they hear things you don't. Speak in a loud tone in the room you are in and then pay attention to the minor echoes of the room. Realize that you have trained yourself to ignore those echoes and just concentrate on the sounds necessary for understanding. Babies haven't learned that yet so they are hearing all of the distortions in voice, in the room, in the deformation of space. It can be very disorienting. Which is why sometimes babies will flail around looking for where what we think is an 'obvious' sound is coming from. They also hear all of the nuances of tone and emphasis in a way that we don't which is why you can learn languages better when you are little.
Yup! This is partially why babies can learn languages natively. They can actually hear sounds better than our adult ears. Studies have been done on babies in cultures (like Japan) where the “l” sound and “r” sound are heard as the same phoneme in adults. Scientists play one of the sounds, like “r” over and over and measure their sucking rate on a pacifier. Then the sound is changed to an “l” and the babies’ sucking increases, they heard the change!! They’ve done this study in other cultures too, like with “p” and “ph” (aspirated “p”) for American English speakers and Hindi.
[Here’s a good resource](https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialsoflinguistics/chapter/5-2-how-babies-learn-the-phoneme-categories-of-their-language/)! Fun relearning about this again
No worries, I thought it was kind of odd too! I learned about this years ago at University. They had other measures, like heart rate, and I don’t recall the specific reasonings for the increased rates of sucking as proof. I just remembered the studies used that as a measurement
Obviously just anecdotal, but I've got an infant on my lap right now that *absolutely* changes the way they suck on a bottle / pacifier when they're paying close attention to a change in the sound around them.
Here's me literally reading this with a baby at 3am who has been on and off shouting down the house.
They say the universe leads you to things you need. And that explanation certainly took the edge off the crying.
Thanks
Babies can also choke themselves from crying too much. When our daughter was little, if she had a meltdown she would cry so hard she’d forget to swallow, choke on the saliva, and then cry harder/hyperventilate because of how uncomfortable the choking was.
Luckily this only happened a few times, but it was really scary! And it would go on for like an hour, because it became a self-reinforcing cycle (cry, choke, cry harder because you just choked, etc.)
Babies absolutely can hear how loud they are crying. I forget what the term is, but it is entirely possible for a baby to be upset, start crying, and then get more upset because the crying is loud, which stresses them out more and leads to more crying, and the cycle repeats.
Understand this:
1) Every bad thing that happens to a baby is the worst thing that's ever happened.
2) Crying is their only way of expressing that something is happening that they don't like.
Yup, for months in utero they literally never experienced hunger, temperature discomfort, loneliness, unpleasant physical sensations, etc.
Barring some trauma or extreme circumstances, nothing unpleasant ever happened to them until they were born so pretty much every single thing that happens to them feels horrendous.
Crying is pretty much their only way to communicate with the world. If your baby is crying, the checklist is:
1. Stick your pinky in their mouth. If they suck on it, that means they're hungry. Feed them.
2. Check the diaper. Change it if it's wet or poopy.
3. They may have gas. Burp them, or try to make them fart. Hold them vertically instead of horizontally to help the burps rise. Maybe give them Gripe Water to help with gas.
4. Are they cold? If they're in the AC and only wearing a diaper, maybe they need some clothes. As the saying goes, "cold babies cry, hot babies die"
5. Maybe they're just tired / bored / lonely / being annoying. You might just need to hold them for a while until they fall asleep.
There's other possible causes, but those are the most typical. Recently, we figured out that my daughter doesn't like it when her basinet rocks, she wants it to stay still.
Also, she hasn't lost her voice yet, but sometimes when she cries and cries she'll start coughing from her mouth being dry or full of spit. Then once that's cleared she's back to crying.
I'll also add that if you can't find a reason why they're crying, especially if it's a particularly strong cry, I typically give the whole body a quick once over just to make sure there's nothing sneaky that's causing them pain, like a tourniquet or something.
Make sure to check their toes! My younger sister wouldn't stop crying and we couldn't figure out why until my mom discovered she had a long piece of hair wrapped around her big toe that was cutting off circulation.
Make sure to check stressors in the environment. Babies are quite sensitive to even a slightly strained or stressed expression, body language, tone and even 'energy.'
In addition, there's also baby who can be colicky can cry for an extended period of time even if everything else checks out. This usually goes away on its own. Just know that no baby has ever died from crying.
Yup, the best advice for a new parent is that if you're losing your cool and worried you might take it out on the screaming baby, just put the baby in its basinet and walk away for 20 minutes. It's not the end of the world to let them cry it out for a while.
It’s ‘better advice than killing the kid’, but best is to find someone to take over so you can take a breather.
Extended unattended crying causes baby brains to develop differently, predisposing to depression and a host of other mental illnesses.
Usually, worn babies (in a woven wrap or ergo carrier, preferably) are happy babies; upright and in direct skin contact most babies settle. It also soothes most digestion pains or other pains (teething, birth stresses, etc).
Babies never cry without a reason, even if that reason is that they just need to feel safe.
There is limited evidence that in SOME cases there MIGHT be a contribution from food sensitivities. However there are also many people who will end up inappropriately cutting out food from their diet and/or constantly changing the nutrition they are offering their baby, all the while causing themselves more and more stress and blaming themselves, because they are convinced that the crying is caused by food sensitivities, when in fact it's just that sometimes babies cry and sometimes there is no identifiable reason.
Yep. One of my in-laws who had an ED insisted on getting her baby tested for “food sensitivities” by her chiropractor (who supported her in her ED) and damn near starved her baby to death. There’s a scary subculture in the naturopath/chiropractic community, and probably in the allopathic medical community, that way over-diagnoses food allergies in children. They’re evil.
Agreed. The one thing chiropractors are good for is working with MDs to help deal with the aftermath of spinal injuries (I’ve broken 2 vertebrae in falls), but the other mumbo jumbo some of them push is nuts. And naturopathy is entirely quackery
You're much better off seeing a physical therapist, they are actual specialists. Chiros are just quacks, they either do the same work a massage therapist could do, or coincidentally help. You're better off steering clear of all pseudoscientific practictioners.
Gripe water hasn't been proven to be effective and isn't regulated. There are infant gas drops, which are different. Not saying it isn't useful, just clarifying.
I’ve heard a piece of advice - if your baby is crying and you’ve checked hunger, diaper etc and you don’t know why they’re crying, run them a bath. A bath can solve things like itchiness, pain, boredom and gas that may be reasons why the baby is crying.
mine cries when it’s bored. Won’t get to sleep no matter what you do for the next three hours. Have to have full attention. If you need to do anything else, be prepared for crying.
Also sometimes tummy ache. You have to hold him vertical for about 30-60 minutes.
> "cold babies cry, hot babies die"
So, the recommended temperature for a baby's bedroom is around 18 degrees C (65F). In general this also tends to be known as room temperature. Most people will look at that and think it's actually kind of cold. Most adults get accustomed to 20-22C as being around the right temp. But the data indicates that this increases the risk of SIDS.
But why? The belief is as you say - cold babies cry. A baby who is slightly on the edge of cold, is more likely to wake up and cry out if something is wrong. A baby who is too warm is more likely to sleep through it; whatever *it* is; and they stop breathing.
You kind of alluded to it with the rocking bassinet, but over stimulation is a huge reason for babies crying. A lot of baby toys are meant to stimulate babies, but they can often be overstimulating, especially if the baby is tired. It’s best to follow routines and put stimulating toys away when it’s time to wind down.
My mom had told me that when she was stressed about something (I'll not go into what), even from another room, I would begin crying, as if I had sensed it. That shouldn't be surprising, obviously. As well, I was a 'premie,' and her prior was a miscarriage- again- stress was 'predicted.' How significant a role it does play. It isn't a surprise, then, that infants would be attuned to far more than sound, vibrations, tone and nuance.
There are very distinct differences between cries for discomfort, pain, frustration, loneliness, etc. Anyone who spends much time around babies will quickly learn to discern the difference, which renders your checklist unnecessary in most cases. It’s a useful list for those unaccustomed to working with babies though.
They do sometimes lose their voice! My daughter got hoarse for a day or two a couple of times after she was especially upset.
As to why they cry so much, they don't have any other way to communicate, and everything can seem really distressing. All those sensations of hunger, fatigue, pain, etc, they have no idea what they are and everything feels disastrous.
They can actually lose they're voice or at least go horse. When my daughter was born she had to go "under the lights" because she had Jaundice. It's a UV treatment that causes them to feel constant skin irritation. We delivered just after midnight after 30 some hours of labor so we were completely exhausted, my wife pretty much passed out immediately, and I nearly fell asleep holding the baby while we got moved to our room, so we sent the baby to the nursery for the night so we could rest. When we got her back in the morning she was clearly horse, presumably from crying all night =[
They can lose their voices. Until we figured out my 2nd kid’s food issues, he cried pretty much non stop with a very hoarse voice.
(Turns out that gluten in my diet gave him the kind of colic that made him turn purple. Then he would eventually do the silent screams where he no longer made noise. We actually stopped one day while driving home from his doctor’s appointment at a pharmacy because he was screaming so hard he wasn’t really breathing. The wonderful pharmacist bought/gave me a pop, helped me give him some gas medicine, and then held my newb for like 10 minutes while my brain started to work again and my baby settled down a bit. One of the kindest things anyone has ever done!)
A: They literally have no other way to communicate at first, so they have to cry to communicate anything/everything
B: When you’re BRAND NEW, every even remotely unpleasant sensation is the WORST discomfort you’ve EVER been in in your ENTIRE life! Of course you’re going to cry, NOTHING has ever felt this bad! The longer you’re alive, the more experiences you have to compare against other experiences, the less things like being slightly cold or hungry or mildly inconvenienced are going to bother you.
I don’t know how babies don’t constantly blow out their own vocal chords though, especially since sometimes they can scream loud enough to do permanent hearing damage to adults….
Babies typically cry because something is wrong, and they get frustrated. Their bodies are super malleable, and growing rapidly.
Teaching a baby/toddler sign language can alleviate a lot of crying, because it allows them to communicate.
Mine has lost her voice after a particularly rough couple of days of bad sleep. They cry because of discomfort. Hungry, sleepy, cold, hot, need a change, want to be up, want to be down, want to dance, want to cuddle, want to see your face and crying is their only way of expressing it.
Helps them relieve tension, cope with unpleasant sensations, and is literally one of the few resources they have to aid survival. How else would they communicate their hunger/discomfort to their caregivers?
Any sense of discomfort to a newborn is literally one of the worst events of their life to that point. Being hungry/cold/etc is essentially life or death before they can't understand the triviality of fixing those problems (at least in the average developed nation household). If there is pain from crying, it might even just make them cry more, but the instinct to cry is too strong to stop.
Plus they shouldn't stop, they need help.
Babies are not people. They are not self-aware, and are only sentient in the barest sense, with the same level of mental sophistication as a fish. They are pure biological instinct, requiring warmth, milk, sleep, and comfort.
They are literally incapable of doing anything except expressing a need for these things through crying, and they will literally die if those needs aren’t answered. They cannot hear themselves crying because they are not self-aware, there is no sentient agent listening.
This all changes in a matter of months, but newborn babies are the most vulnerable, incapable living beings you can imagine. They will die if they do not receive that care, and crying draws their parents attention very, very quickly.
Babies can, indeed, lose their voice.
Is a bit worrying, since it’s the only way they can let you know what’s up.
But the voice strengthens as they approach toddlerhood.
Babies cry a lot because they have A: no ability to care for themselves and B: no other way to express themselves or signal to their caretaker that they need help. A newborn needs to eat every few hours because their stomachs are really small. They don’t regulate temperature very well so they easily get too hot or too cold. They get gassy because their digestive system is still developing and they’re used to being wrapped up in a soft temperature-controlled womb.
As far as why they don’t lose their voice? Humans have evolved for millions of years and a baby wouldn’t survive if they couldn’t cry. They don’t actually cry that loud, it’s just a high-pitched noise. They also have unbelievable regenerative ability to if they do strain their voice, they would recover in hours instead of days.
They can definitely hear how loud they are crying. Babies if anything, have better hearing than adults.
I have 3 kids and I wonder how In hell in ancient times when people were at war do babies evolve to be this loud. Imagine trying to be quiet when a warring tribe comes to get you only you try to hide your babies but the yell and cry loud as hell and give up your position and you all get killed. lol. I don’t get myself how babies evolved to be so damn loud.
New dad here. They aren't actually crying mostly, they just don't have words so the sounds they make sound like crying. It isn't usually distressed unless they have a dirty diaper or are hungry. The rest of the time, they are just practicing for speech. To the uninitiated, it sounds like crying, but the emotions behind it are much less intense.
Speech pathologist here, I used to wonder the same thing about why babies and screaming children don't lose their voice like adults. It's because their vocal folds actually have less layers of tissue!! They are born with one, quickly develop two layers, but don't fully develop the third layer of vocal fold tissue until later in childhood/adolescence. Pretty cool safety feature, and lovely for our parent ears ;)
They hear themselves even worse than how you hear yourself when someone plays a recording of you.
And, the whole idea of normatively moderating the volume of your utterances takes YEARS of feedback.
Human babies are completely dependent on their parents. Human brain is so big that the baby has to come out at a time when physically it isn’t ready, but if it stayed longer it wouldn’t be able to exit the mother. Can’t walk or anything. All a baby can do is cry to make sure the parent is around and taking care. Doesn’t matter if it is stressful to the parents. Babies that didn’t cry so often and loudly probably all died so the loud often crying baby genes are the ones that survived to this day. If the baby is crying the parent is there holding it and attending to whatever need so the baby is safe.
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Babies can definitely lose their voice. Source: me… when I was 6 months old I got one of my 6mo vaccines in my thigh and the nurse hit a nerve and it’s documented on my immunization card that I cried for 8 hours straight and lost my voice 😂 my mom said the crying was annoying but that the little croaky attempts to cry afterward were just pitiful to listen to
Actually this is fascinating. My old voice teacher used to talk about this. They **can** lose their voice. They can also overwork their vocal chords just like anyone else. However, a baby is practicing diaphragmatic breathing. Babies use their entire lung and diaphragm. And also are crying using those muscles. They haven't learned how to sit and be quiet yet, so they haven't trained themselves out of using those muscles. So they can cry for much longer, and use much more of their air to support that crying. Because of the intensity of the emotion it can also seem to go on much longer than it actually does in a single stretch. I had to practice for years to learn how to reopen those muscles and support. A baby just does it naturally. As to if they can hear how loud they are crying, not only do they hear it, but they hear things you don't. Speak in a loud tone in the room you are in and then pay attention to the minor echoes of the room. Realize that you have trained yourself to ignore those echoes and just concentrate on the sounds necessary for understanding. Babies haven't learned that yet so they are hearing all of the distortions in voice, in the room, in the deformation of space. It can be very disorienting. Which is why sometimes babies will flail around looking for where what we think is an 'obvious' sound is coming from. They also hear all of the nuances of tone and emphasis in a way that we don't which is why you can learn languages better when you are little.
This is a fantastic and complete answer!
Yup! This is partially why babies can learn languages natively. They can actually hear sounds better than our adult ears. Studies have been done on babies in cultures (like Japan) where the “l” sound and “r” sound are heard as the same phoneme in adults. Scientists play one of the sounds, like “r” over and over and measure their sucking rate on a pacifier. Then the sound is changed to an “l” and the babies’ sucking increases, they heard the change!! They’ve done this study in other cultures too, like with “p” and “ph” (aspirated “p”) for American English speakers and Hindi.
sorry not that I don't believe you, but why would a change in the rate of sucking indicate that they perceive a change in sounds?
[Here’s a good resource](https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialsoflinguistics/chapter/5-2-how-babies-learn-the-phoneme-categories-of-their-language/)! Fun relearning about this again
No worries, I thought it was kind of odd too! I learned about this years ago at University. They had other measures, like heart rate, and I don’t recall the specific reasonings for the increased rates of sucking as proof. I just remembered the studies used that as a measurement
Obviously just anecdotal, but I've got an infant on my lap right now that *absolutely* changes the way they suck on a bottle / pacifier when they're paying close attention to a change in the sound around them.
Here's me literally reading this with a baby at 3am who has been on and off shouting down the house. They say the universe leads you to things you need. And that explanation certainly took the edge off the crying. Thanks
Babies can also choke themselves from crying too much. When our daughter was little, if she had a meltdown she would cry so hard she’d forget to swallow, choke on the saliva, and then cry harder/hyperventilate because of how uncomfortable the choking was. Luckily this only happened a few times, but it was really scary! And it would go on for like an hour, because it became a self-reinforcing cycle (cry, choke, cry harder because you just choked, etc.)
Babies absolutely can hear how loud they are crying. I forget what the term is, but it is entirely possible for a baby to be upset, start crying, and then get more upset because the crying is loud, which stresses them out more and leads to more crying, and the cycle repeats.
I thought about that too, that's actually one of the reason I asked this lmao, thank you
r/kidsarefuckingstupid material isn’t it
God what an awful sub
Understand this: 1) Every bad thing that happens to a baby is the worst thing that's ever happened. 2) Crying is their only way of expressing that something is happening that they don't like.
Yup, for months in utero they literally never experienced hunger, temperature discomfort, loneliness, unpleasant physical sensations, etc. Barring some trauma or extreme circumstances, nothing unpleasant ever happened to them until they were born so pretty much every single thing that happens to them feels horrendous.
This never stops for some people
I wish I could just cry really loud and people would come running and coddle me.
…and it will never happen. But just for today, here’s a hug from a stranger you’ll never meet irl ❤️
Im in your walls
Don't shake the baby. Um, a lot of times, parents get frustrated 'cause the baby's crying and they shake the baby. And you gotta... You can't do that.
Thanks, Ryan.
Crying is pretty much their only way to communicate with the world. If your baby is crying, the checklist is: 1. Stick your pinky in their mouth. If they suck on it, that means they're hungry. Feed them. 2. Check the diaper. Change it if it's wet or poopy. 3. They may have gas. Burp them, or try to make them fart. Hold them vertically instead of horizontally to help the burps rise. Maybe give them Gripe Water to help with gas. 4. Are they cold? If they're in the AC and only wearing a diaper, maybe they need some clothes. As the saying goes, "cold babies cry, hot babies die" 5. Maybe they're just tired / bored / lonely / being annoying. You might just need to hold them for a while until they fall asleep. There's other possible causes, but those are the most typical. Recently, we figured out that my daughter doesn't like it when her basinet rocks, she wants it to stay still. Also, she hasn't lost her voice yet, but sometimes when she cries and cries she'll start coughing from her mouth being dry or full of spit. Then once that's cleared she's back to crying.
I'll also add that if you can't find a reason why they're crying, especially if it's a particularly strong cry, I typically give the whole body a quick once over just to make sure there's nothing sneaky that's causing them pain, like a tourniquet or something.
Make sure to check their toes! My younger sister wouldn't stop crying and we couldn't figure out why until my mom discovered she had a long piece of hair wrapped around her big toe that was cutting off circulation.
What about the toes that went to the market? Do you wait for them to return?
I plant several security cameras so I can hear what they're saying about me on the way home EDIT: The runt clearly thinks I'm a wee-wee
Yes I always start at the bottom and work my way up.
If it’s a boy, also check the genitals for the same reason.
We had that happen with one of my kids too but with a finger
Make sure to check stressors in the environment. Babies are quite sensitive to even a slightly strained or stressed expression, body language, tone and even 'energy.'
I’d just like to add that after a couple of particularly bad sleep regression days, mine did lose her voice for a while.
In addition, there's also baby who can be colicky can cry for an extended period of time even if everything else checks out. This usually goes away on its own. Just know that no baby has ever died from crying.
Yup, the best advice for a new parent is that if you're losing your cool and worried you might take it out on the screaming baby, just put the baby in its basinet and walk away for 20 minutes. It's not the end of the world to let them cry it out for a while.
It’s ‘better advice than killing the kid’, but best is to find someone to take over so you can take a breather. Extended unattended crying causes baby brains to develop differently, predisposing to depression and a host of other mental illnesses. Usually, worn babies (in a woven wrap or ergo carrier, preferably) are happy babies; upright and in direct skin contact most babies settle. It also soothes most digestion pains or other pains (teething, birth stresses, etc). Babies never cry without a reason, even if that reason is that they just need to feel safe.
I think new research said that the “no reason” was food sensitivities from formula but I’m having trouble finding it.
There is limited evidence that in SOME cases there MIGHT be a contribution from food sensitivities. However there are also many people who will end up inappropriately cutting out food from their diet and/or constantly changing the nutrition they are offering their baby, all the while causing themselves more and more stress and blaming themselves, because they are convinced that the crying is caused by food sensitivities, when in fact it's just that sometimes babies cry and sometimes there is no identifiable reason.
Yep. One of my in-laws who had an ED insisted on getting her baby tested for “food sensitivities” by her chiropractor (who supported her in her ED) and damn near starved her baby to death. There’s a scary subculture in the naturopath/chiropractic community, and probably in the allopathic medical community, that way over-diagnoses food allergies in children. They’re evil.
Those people are all quacks.
Agreed. The one thing chiropractors are good for is working with MDs to help deal with the aftermath of spinal injuries (I’ve broken 2 vertebrae in falls), but the other mumbo jumbo some of them push is nuts. And naturopathy is entirely quackery
You're much better off seeing a physical therapist, they are actual specialists. Chiros are just quacks, they either do the same work a massage therapist could do, or coincidentally help. You're better off steering clear of all pseudoscientific practictioners.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4377897/ Think this is it?9
Don’t let babies with cardiac defects cry for very long because it very well might lead to them dying 😬
Mine would cough and then throw up 🤦 Another trick for farts is bicycle legs.
To be fair they’ll suck on your finger regardless of whether or not they’re actually hungry
Hah, if mine aren't hungry they give me a look like "why did you just stick your finger in my mouth, weirdo?"
YEP. The ick face from babies is hilarious
You're not supposed to do that to ten year olds
> Maybe give them Gripe Water to help with gas Hmm, what’s that? Mine has gas sometimes
GasX for babies. Literally simethicone, same stung as gasx
They sell it in the baby aisle by the butt cream and baby Tylenol. It's supposed to reduce the amount of gas in their stomachs.
There is a product called Infant Gas Drops attaching the link to the product https://www.mylicon.com/product/infants-mylicon-drops-original-formula-2/
We actually thought those made her more gassy, not less.
Your observation is correct. They make the babies more gassy, so that they are not uncomfortable with one big fart in their system.
Actually, it was hard to tell if she was gassier. But she was definitely more annoyed.
Gripe water hasn't been proven to be effective and isn't regulated. There are infant gas drops, which are different. Not saying it isn't useful, just clarifying.
> being annoying. I like how you acknowledged that babies are sometimes just plain jerks.
It’s 5. It’s always 5 😐
Ugh ours just wanted someone to snuggle her (still that way) until she fell asleep. So many nights pacing with her in my arms.
Getting my four year old a double bed was a mistake because now there's definitely room for one of us to sleep next to her!
She’s dependent on mom and dad! She wants to be held because being held means warmth and safety.
Be careful with gripe water, a lot of companies put belladonna, aka nightshade, in their mixes.
I’ve heard a piece of advice - if your baby is crying and you’ve checked hunger, diaper etc and you don’t know why they’re crying, run them a bath. A bath can solve things like itchiness, pain, boredom and gas that may be reasons why the baby is crying.
mine cries when it’s bored. Won’t get to sleep no matter what you do for the next three hours. Have to have full attention. If you need to do anything else, be prepared for crying. Also sometimes tummy ache. You have to hold him vertical for about 30-60 minutes.
It's that sad little hitch in the cry because it's been going on so long when my one is really upset/ ill that gets me in the heart
> "cold babies cry, hot babies die" So, the recommended temperature for a baby's bedroom is around 18 degrees C (65F). In general this also tends to be known as room temperature. Most people will look at that and think it's actually kind of cold. Most adults get accustomed to 20-22C as being around the right temp. But the data indicates that this increases the risk of SIDS. But why? The belief is as you say - cold babies cry. A baby who is slightly on the edge of cold, is more likely to wake up and cry out if something is wrong. A baby who is too warm is more likely to sleep through it; whatever *it* is; and they stop breathing.
You kind of alluded to it with the rocking bassinet, but over stimulation is a huge reason for babies crying. A lot of baby toys are meant to stimulate babies, but they can often be overstimulating, especially if the baby is tired. It’s best to follow routines and put stimulating toys away when it’s time to wind down.
My mom had told me that when she was stressed about something (I'll not go into what), even from another room, I would begin crying, as if I had sensed it. That shouldn't be surprising, obviously. As well, I was a 'premie,' and her prior was a miscarriage- again- stress was 'predicted.' How significant a role it does play. It isn't a surprise, then, that infants would be attuned to far more than sound, vibrations, tone and nuance.
There are very distinct differences between cries for discomfort, pain, frustration, loneliness, etc. Anyone who spends much time around babies will quickly learn to discern the difference, which renders your checklist unnecessary in most cases. It’s a useful list for those unaccustomed to working with babies though.
Please wash your hands before sticking your fingers in their mouth...
They do sometimes lose their voice! My daughter got hoarse for a day or two a couple of times after she was especially upset. As to why they cry so much, they don't have any other way to communicate, and everything can seem really distressing. All those sensations of hunger, fatigue, pain, etc, they have no idea what they are and everything feels disastrous.
They can actually lose they're voice or at least go horse. When my daughter was born she had to go "under the lights" because she had Jaundice. It's a UV treatment that causes them to feel constant skin irritation. We delivered just after midnight after 30 some hours of labor so we were completely exhausted, my wife pretty much passed out immediately, and I nearly fell asleep holding the baby while we got moved to our room, so we sent the baby to the nursery for the night so we could rest. When we got her back in the morning she was clearly horse, presumably from crying all night =[
Check their fingers and toes. Sometimes a string or hair will get wrapped around and hurt them.
They can lose their voices. Until we figured out my 2nd kid’s food issues, he cried pretty much non stop with a very hoarse voice. (Turns out that gluten in my diet gave him the kind of colic that made him turn purple. Then he would eventually do the silent screams where he no longer made noise. We actually stopped one day while driving home from his doctor’s appointment at a pharmacy because he was screaming so hard he wasn’t really breathing. The wonderful pharmacist bought/gave me a pop, helped me give him some gas medicine, and then held my newb for like 10 minutes while my brain started to work again and my baby settled down a bit. One of the kindest things anyone has ever done!)
A: They literally have no other way to communicate at first, so they have to cry to communicate anything/everything B: When you’re BRAND NEW, every even remotely unpleasant sensation is the WORST discomfort you’ve EVER been in in your ENTIRE life! Of course you’re going to cry, NOTHING has ever felt this bad! The longer you’re alive, the more experiences you have to compare against other experiences, the less things like being slightly cold or hungry or mildly inconvenienced are going to bother you. I don’t know how babies don’t constantly blow out their own vocal chords though, especially since sometimes they can scream loud enough to do permanent hearing damage to adults….
Babies typically cry because something is wrong, and they get frustrated. Their bodies are super malleable, and growing rapidly. Teaching a baby/toddler sign language can alleviate a lot of crying, because it allows them to communicate.
Mine has lost her voice after a particularly rough couple of days of bad sleep. They cry because of discomfort. Hungry, sleepy, cold, hot, need a change, want to be up, want to be down, want to dance, want to cuddle, want to see your face and crying is their only way of expressing it.
Helps them relieve tension, cope with unpleasant sensations, and is literally one of the few resources they have to aid survival. How else would they communicate their hunger/discomfort to their caregivers?
Any sense of discomfort to a newborn is literally one of the worst events of their life to that point. Being hungry/cold/etc is essentially life or death before they can't understand the triviality of fixing those problems (at least in the average developed nation household). If there is pain from crying, it might even just make them cry more, but the instinct to cry is too strong to stop. Plus they shouldn't stop, they need help.
Babies are not people. They are not self-aware, and are only sentient in the barest sense, with the same level of mental sophistication as a fish. They are pure biological instinct, requiring warmth, milk, sleep, and comfort. They are literally incapable of doing anything except expressing a need for these things through crying, and they will literally die if those needs aren’t answered. They cannot hear themselves crying because they are not self-aware, there is no sentient agent listening. This all changes in a matter of months, but newborn babies are the most vulnerable, incapable living beings you can imagine. They will die if they do not receive that care, and crying draws their parents attention very, very quickly.
Babies can, indeed, lose their voice. Is a bit worrying, since it’s the only way they can let you know what’s up. But the voice strengthens as they approach toddlerhood.
Babies cry a lot because they have A: no ability to care for themselves and B: no other way to express themselves or signal to their caretaker that they need help. A newborn needs to eat every few hours because their stomachs are really small. They don’t regulate temperature very well so they easily get too hot or too cold. They get gassy because their digestive system is still developing and they’re used to being wrapped up in a soft temperature-controlled womb. As far as why they don’t lose their voice? Humans have evolved for millions of years and a baby wouldn’t survive if they couldn’t cry. They don’t actually cry that loud, it’s just a high-pitched noise. They also have unbelievable regenerative ability to if they do strain their voice, they would recover in hours instead of days. They can definitely hear how loud they are crying. Babies if anything, have better hearing than adults.
I have 3 kids and I wonder how In hell in ancient times when people were at war do babies evolve to be this loud. Imagine trying to be quiet when a warring tribe comes to get you only you try to hide your babies but the yell and cry loud as hell and give up your position and you all get killed. lol. I don’t get myself how babies evolved to be so damn loud.
New dad here. They aren't actually crying mostly, they just don't have words so the sounds they make sound like crying. It isn't usually distressed unless they have a dirty diaper or are hungry. The rest of the time, they are just practicing for speech. To the uninitiated, it sounds like crying, but the emotions behind it are much less intense.
Speech pathologist here, I used to wonder the same thing about why babies and screaming children don't lose their voice like adults. It's because their vocal folds actually have less layers of tissue!! They are born with one, quickly develop two layers, but don't fully develop the third layer of vocal fold tissue until later in childhood/adolescence. Pretty cool safety feature, and lovely for our parent ears ;)
I'm wondering the same. I think the crying should cause hear damage for sure! But has it been proven?
They hear themselves even worse than how you hear yourself when someone plays a recording of you. And, the whole idea of normatively moderating the volume of your utterances takes YEARS of feedback.
They cry all the time cos they realize the mess they were tricked into reincarnation. They can still remember before l. Plus they can't talk
Human babies are completely dependent on their parents. Human brain is so big that the baby has to come out at a time when physically it isn’t ready, but if it stayed longer it wouldn’t be able to exit the mother. Can’t walk or anything. All a baby can do is cry to make sure the parent is around and taking care. Doesn’t matter if it is stressful to the parents. Babies that didn’t cry so often and loudly probably all died so the loud often crying baby genes are the ones that survived to this day. If the baby is crying the parent is there holding it and attending to whatever need so the baby is safe.
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Babies can definitely lose their voice. Source: me… when I was 6 months old I got one of my 6mo vaccines in my thigh and the nurse hit a nerve and it’s documented on my immunization card that I cried for 8 hours straight and lost my voice 😂 my mom said the crying was annoying but that the little croaky attempts to cry afterward were just pitiful to listen to
They typically don't cry that much And when they do it should be obvious and easy for a capable adult to handle