Baby’s Crying Might Be Saying He’s Unhappy With the World
Orlando Sentinel
Edward Tronick of the Infant-Parent Communication Lab, University of Massachusetts
New parents invariably leave the hospital with this advice: When baby cries he’s either wet, hungry or needs a nap.
As with all answers that seem too pat, this one is. There’s another reason baby may be crying. He may be depressed.
“If a baby’s need are not met, whether physical or emotional, he can feel depressed even from day one,” said Dr. Eric G. Don-Pedro, a child and adolescent neuropsychologist at Laurel Oaks Hospital in Orlando.
Don-Pedro is one of a new generation of psychologists and psychiatrists who have begun to treat emotional problems in children as young as 6 months, sometimes even younger. The field of infant psychology and psychiatry was born of a recognition that infants communicate and that this early communication is critical to later development.
All the coos, goos, babbling and leg kicking are, in fact, communications. They are baby’s language, said Chaya Roth, Director of the Parent-Infant Development Service at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
“The trick is to figure out what it all means.”
Psychologists and psychiatrists have been trying to do just that. By watching babies interact with their environment and their parents, therapists can “read” the baby’s communication. The hope is that by helping parents recognize these early signals, they may be able to prevent later developmental problems, such as bed-wetting, stuttering, temper tantrums and sleep disorders.
Parents of babies with emotional and developmental problems suffer tremendous guilt. Consequently, getting help for problem babies is often difficult, Don-Pedro said. The key is for parents to recognize that counseling for babies, as with adults, is not a taboo but a necessity.
“You don’t have to come from such terrible environmental conditions for things to be bad for you,” Roth said. “Some parents are so stressed with their own problems that they’re not attending to the baby. They just don’t read the baby’s signs.”
This is neither to suggest that parents must constantly monitor their emotions to ensure a healthy emotional climate for baby. Nor that they should drop everything and run the first instant baby makes a sound.
“Babies have to recognize that other people have needs, to, and that starts from the time baby has to wait for the bottle or the breast,” said Roth.”
