How much attention does a baby really need?
I have a one-month-old baby. All she wants to do is eat or be held. Is it normal for a child to need such constant attention?
Your new baby is making a big adjustment to her new world. What a different world it is than the one she was in for the last nine months!
She is adjusting to new feels, sounds, sights, smells and tastes and learning that the world is a safe and responsive place where she will get her needs met. She is working on becoming familiar with the faces, voices, smells and sounds of her important people and is figuring out how to communicate her needs to you.
She doesn’t understand her communication system any better than you do, but the two of you are working together to understand each other. You are learning to understand her different signals and she is learning to refine them so she can communicate her needs more specifically.
As you learn each other's signals, it is important to spend time together touching, talking, holding and making eye contact. Through this closeness you learn about your baby's needs and signals and your baby learns to trust in your presence. One of the main sources of communication babies use is crying. Crying is probably the clue she is currently giving you that she wants to be held or fed.
It's often challenging for new parents to figure out how to respond to their baby’s cries. A baby’s crying falls into two main categories: crying you can do something about and crying you can’t do much about.
Crying that you can do something about stems from hunger, cold or fatigue. Some babies cry because their diaper is wet and will stop if you change it.
Crying that you can’t do much about is crying that babies do to release tension or to express their emerging feelings. This kind of crying is not "fixable" by making a physical change for the baby.
You can still help your baby when they are doing this kind of crying by staying close, calm, relaxed, attentive and reassuring. You can also observe carefully during this kind of crying to see if your baby gives you a signal that there is something else you can do to help.
We are often tempted during this kind of crying to shake or pat a baby vigorously to get them to stop. This can be disturbing and even dangerous for a baby.
It is important to remember that it is not your responsibility to "stop" your baby’s crying. It is, however, important that you try to be as attentive and responsive to your baby’s feelings as possible.
While it sounds like it would be relatively easy to figure out which of these two kinds of crying is happening, it is often not clear until you try several different responses. You don’t need to expect yourself to know right away which kind of crying your baby is doing. One of your best strategies is simply educated guessing or "trial and error."
The other challenge for new parents is that they often feel exhausted and overwhelmed. They have just made a major life change and are most likely doing it on limited and interrupted sleep. Their days are taken up with all of the details of caring for and getting to know a new baby. It is difficult to decode your baby’s communication system on top of all that.
Part Three: Learn 10 ways to comfort your baby
10 ways to calm your baby -- and help her develop a sense of trust
1. Respond to her cries in a variety of ways. Often a parent discovers one way of responding that makes the baby stop crying and then they continue to use only that method every time the crying starts. Infant specialist Magda Gerber reminds us that when a baby is crying, you can ask the baby what the crying is about. Obviously, babies won’t be able to tell you in words, but by really paying attention to the baby's signals and trying different responses you can eventually figure it out.
Since babies cry for different reasons, the same solution won’t be appropriate each time. Interestingly, if you just respond one way (for instance, by feeding your child) your child may come to believe that food is what she is crying for and may learn to use food as a way to comfort herse