Recently, I wrote about a study carried out by Finnish and Swedish scientists since the 1950’s which concluded that science cannot tell why your baby is crying.
I have a friend who is currently on maternity leave after having her first child, and it seems unacceptable that crying babies should still remain a scientific mystery. After all, babies have been around for over a century, and have been crying since at least the 1950’s (apparently).
So I decided while I was driving home from work this evening to research the problem myself, so that I could come to an informed conclusion regarding this thorny dilemma.
(Disclaimer: Thorns, if used incorrectly, will cause babies to cry. Please be responsible.)
(Disclaimer #2: The following explanation is 100% informed conclusion-free. No research was utilized in the writing of this explanation.)
I decided to approach the problem using deductive logic. (Disclaimer: If your doctor induced labor, inductive logic is more appropriate. If your child was delivered using technology, such as a C-section, you might just as well send your baby to Finland/Sweden to be experimented on, for all the good it will do.)
First, let’s eliminate some of the old wives’ tales. Most layparents attribute crying to the child being hungry, or needing to be changed, or needing to be held, or needing to be rocked. That is just ridiculous. Babies are the most fed, most changed, and most cuddled class in modern society. If cuddling children worked, the only time you’d hear babies cry is when they were left in airports to be raised by feral children whose parents forgot to take them home.
About the only time babies don’t cry is before they’re born, so this seems like a good place to start. If unborn babies don’t cry, and born babies cry at the drop of a hat, maybe there’s a difference between being born and not born that acts as a contributing factor to crying. Let’s take a look: Continue reading
A Labor of Like 