More Than Picking Up a Crying Baby
Why do you pick up a baby who is crying? A crying baby is distressed over discomfort, hunger, being startled, and so forth, and without response, slides into despair.
Babies cannot self-soothe. Picking up and soothing them prevents igniting a canopy of emotional issues. While soothed, baby learns how to self-soothe. They copy rocking self gently, caressing self as you do, AND your gentle nurturing sounds. Self-soothing from having been soothed.
As they get older, they soothe as they’ve been soothed. Or, if not soothed, they DON’T know how to self-soothe or soothe others. Not knowing how to self-soothe, people act out for negative attention, because it’s best they feel they can get. Yet, acting out is a cry for help AND of hope. Babies (people) who stop crying have lost hope, sliding into depression or worse.
Teenagers and adults will use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, self-injury, and so forth to self-soothe- short-term, gratuitous, or hedonistic self-destructive behaviors. They might also get into, stay in, and lose relationships as a result.
Parents who do not know how to self-soothe may over-compensate with their children, seeking to prevent them from suffering the despair they experienced, often despite their children being ok. The consequence of this may be entitled (spoiled) children who proceed with their own life and relationship problems (intimacy issues) and in a third generation (their children).
The baby… a person who is responded to… learns that in the big world, there is someone who cares they are upset, that they are valuable—important. Some people advocate letting babies "cry it out" as they focus on the practical problem—on the behavior alone. And the tone and pitch of the baby’s cry are designed to bug the heck out of us. That’s because the baby is helpless and HAS to get you to respond.
Balancing the practicalities of sleeping through the night and so forth is a challenge. However, it needs to be handled so that babies can have secure attachment. Remember that a cry of discomfort is also a cry of need. If there is no response, the “cry it out” advocates are correct... the baby will stop crying. They stop because beyond the annoying cry, it is also a cry of hope. When babies—or anyone loses hope—they don't cry out anymore.
Crying out, acting out, and other behaviors are the cries of hope and need; cries to one’s important people.
So, why do you pick up a baby who is crying? For right now AND self-esteem and emotional health for the rest of their lives.
