How to Soothe Your Crying Baby

When baby cries, everything can seem to stand still for mom and dad. The detective work starts – is the baby hungry? Are they hurt? Have they wet themselves? Sometimes babies cry just because they enjoy hearing themselves.

How can we know when something is truly wrong with our baby? I hate to say it, but as parents sometimes we just know. Often, however, we don’t. However, there are a number of things we can do to try to determine the severity of our children’s condition without the need for outside help.

1. Change the Baby’s Diaper
Very often children complain of even the slightest wetness. We certainly don’t want to sit around in wet clothes and they don’t either. Some children love to urinate shortly after being changed – so even if the baby has just been put in a new diaper, check to make sure they are still dry.

2. Offer Food
Has time elapsed since the last feeding? It is very important to measure time intervals between feedings to ensure baby gets enough needed nutrients to grow.

Not yet feeding time? Children who are experiencing growth spurts came feed as frequently as every 1-2 hours. If this is the case the child will certainly get hungry and fussy.

3. Sooth the Baby
Most babies react well to a soothing womb-like environment. Take the baby in your arms and make ‘shh-shh’ noises. This could be enough to pacify them.

4. Bundle Up Baby
Much like elderly adults, babies require more layers in order to keep warm. Our rule of thumb is baby wears 1 more layer of clothing than mom and dad. The crying baby may be cold in an otherwise warm room.

5. Try Putting Baby to Sleep
Babies set their sleeping routine and can generally be trusted to sleep (or to not sleep) at specific times. If there have been a lot of car rides or other disruptions in routine, the baby may be feeling over-tired. 3-5 minutes in the crib or bassinet should determine this – a tired baby will usually soothe themselves to sleep in this amount of time. Be careful not to let them “cry it out” – if it takes longer than a few minutes the baby may not be tired enough to sleep, or they may have an entirely different problem.

6. Our Condolences for Parents of Colicky Babies
Some babies suffer from colic – a condition that results from excessive gas causing severe abdominal pain in otherwise healthy infants. About 20% of babies are reported to be colicky; this is torture for both parent and baby. There are many folk remedies such as peppermint, placing the baby in a swing, feeding only warm milk, etc; however, colicky babies eventually grow out of this phase, normally by the 20th week. Hang in there!

7. Check for Rashes or Skin Irritations
Sometimes the crying baby is having an allergic reaction to something in her environment. Check your baby for any tell-tale skin rashes or marks that could be indicative of a deeper problem.

8. Take the Baby for a Car Ride
The vibration in the back seat of the car can put the baby to sleep. The rising cost of gas gives some parents pause to try this – putting the baby in their car seat on top of a washing machine can have a similar effect, just make sure to keep a hand on the seat at all times to prevent the baby from falling to the floor.

9. Take a Break
A baby that won’t stop crying can be frustrating – but it is critically important that parents keep their cool and never shake their crying baby. If someone feels like they are being pushed to the breaking point by baby’s crying, have them put down the baby and go to another room or just outside for a few minutes. The baby may not stop crying, but the adult will be better able to handle the situation.

10. Let Them Cry
Sometimes there is nothing wrong and babies just want to cry. There are many reasons for this – for example the baby may be comforted by the sound of their voice. Especially in newborns, crying clears and exercises the lungs and is essential to normal development. Remember that the goal is not to stop the baby’s crying (although we might wish they did!), but rather to provide for the baby’s needs.

11. Ask for Help
If you are fortunate enough to have relatives nearby or public resources, ask them for suggestions. They may have more ideas that are not on the list, or someone may have encountered the same situation before and will know what to do. If totally unsure, seek medical advice – it doesn’t hurt to be too careful with baby’s health and safety.

Avoiding Parental Tunnel Vision

Remember that kid back in grade school whose parents made them bring their little sister every time they came out to play?  The big kids would have to accommodate the sister who wasn’t able to ride her bike as quickly or play the same sports.  What happened to that kid?  Eventually we stopped playing with them.  Yes, looking back we can see how cruel it was, but when you are in the thick of it you don’t want to carry around someone else’s baggage.

The so call “parental tunnel vision” is the grown up equivalent of the tag-along sibling.  As parents there is a tendency to focus our entire world onto our children, so when we talk to other people all we can think to discuss is our child’s recent dinner table disaster, their successes and failures in the walking arena, and their babbling sounds.  For our grown-up friends, especially those without children, child’s developmental milestones are not as much of a paradigm shift as they are for us.  If we dominate most of the conversation talking about baby stuff, our friends will end up bored, guaranteed.  If they start to see us as nothing more but an extension of our children (which we are, in a lot of ways) we will start to find ourselves excluded from “grown-up” activities – whether our kids come along or not!

So how do you function as a social adult when your world has been taken over by your children?  First, put yourself in your friends’ shoes.  If you were in their position would you want to be hearing about children all the time?  I don’t mean status updates and major milestones – would you want to spent hours talking about teething developments?  Or would you be thinking “Ok, your kid is normal.  Why are we talking about this?”

Naturally all bets are off when you’re talking to other parents, especially ones whose children are roughly the same age as yours.  Be careful! All those stories and comparisons can turn into a competition, so always be supportive and keep the conversation affirming and friendly.

A Beginning

A new month, a new blog.

Welcome to the Parent’s Nook, a blog about the trials and tribulations of parenthood. I hope to fill this site with a wealth of information over the coming months that other parents and parents-to-be will find useful. For the time being, I offer this “first-post” cliché article.

By way of introductions, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about myself (I promise to keep that to a minimum!) and where I come from when approaching content for this site.

As of writing, I am a father-to-be. The little one is due to arrive at any moment now, and both I and my wife are simultaneously elated, terrified, prepared, and totally clueless when faced with what the coming years has in store for us. My wife is from a large family with a lot of children, I am not.

I noticed that almost as soon as my wife announced she was pregnant, all kind of lost relatives and otherwise strangers began to crawl out of the woodwork and offer ‘advice’ on how to conduct our new selves – the least polite among them simply point out all the ways in which we are wrong about absolutely everything. When you throw in the conflicting media messages about child safety, nutrition, BPA problems in the bottles, and industry-wide recalls on every kind of equipment, it becomes difficult to filter out what is really good advice and what is fluff.

This blog is my escape from all of that bustle. I will disseminate what I have learned and the conclusions I have come to at the end of the day. I am not a doctor, a professional childcare giver, nor anyone else with authority in these matters. I’m just a new parent figuring out the job like anyone else.

Thanks for reading through with me. I hope you will choose to come back and find some value in my writing here. I welcome comments, criticisms, complaints – please do leave your mark anywhere in the site.

Happy Parenting!