A NewBorn’s Ability To Create A Dialogue

We know that crying is a vital part of communication between mother, father, or caregiver and baby. And being adorable is an important part of the dynamic. But what else is needed to keep parents involved in the round-the-clock, sleep-robbing, often frustrating task of keeping a newborn baby alive and safe?

“After six weeks, none of us would still be here if crying were the only thing to keep us attached to our mothers,” says Dr. Heidelise Als, director of Neurobehavioral Infant and Child Studies at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Evolution required that infants develop other features if they were going to entice their mothers to hang in there with them. Dr. Als began looking at those evolved baby tricks by studying mother-infant inter- actions. She got to know mothers well enough during their pregnancies that they invited her into the delivery room. She watched, listened, and took notes as they first laid eyes on their offspring. (“You look like Uncle Louie.” “You’re here, and you’re all mine.”) She came back the next day, and the next, and the next and kept watching, all the while asking herself the same question: What impact is the baby having on the mother?

As time passed, Dr. Als found something that she didn’t expect. There was a dialogue of facial expressions between mothers and newborns that immediately became a two-way street. From day one, the baby’s open eyes made mother happy and inspired her words. The baby’s yawn led to a winding down of the mother’s words. A sneeze would elicit words of comfort. A scrunched-up face would trigger a tender laugh.

Each baby, if you pay close attention, is keeping up his end of a conversation of signals, moods, and rhythms. He’s help- ing to steer adult response, even as individual responses are teaching him to call up new conversational signals. Babies have ways of keeping the people who love and pay attention to them involved, and they’ll begin the dialogue immediately with a birth mother, or with an adoptive parent or other committed caregiver, as soon as they get the chance. Those skills, refined through millions of years of evolution, prove to be enough to get the adults in their lives to put up with crying, sleeplessness, dirty diapers and a transformation of life that new parents can’t possibly have anticipated.

Read More

Why NewBorns Cry

Babies are supposed to cry. It’s the primary tool they have with which to communicate about a messy diaper, an empty stom- ach, and a need for reassurance or human connection. A baby’s health is initially measured, in part, by a strong, lusty cry. Her cries communicate—loudly—her feelings, her needs, and her wants. Adults can’t help but sit up and pay attention.

Research shows that normal, healthy infants have two cries. They have a basic cry and a pain cry. The two are dis- tinct enough to show up differently on printouts of acousti- cal analyses of infants’ cries. The pain cry is urgent—usually high-pitched and loud. It comes on suddenly and includes long periods of breath holding. It’s that pause between one loud, high-pitched waaaft and the second outburst that puts parents on edge. They most likely are running to the infant’s side as the next waaaft comes through, signaling that the infant is still breathing. That’s an instinct worth trusting. When the cry sounds like the baby is signaling pain, a physician should check to see if there’s a physical cause. But an urgent cry of pain is also the cry of colic—signaling that parents might be in for a short-term, bumpy ride.

The other cry, the basic cry, is for everything else—hunger, discomfort, a need to be held. It is somewhat lower in pitch with a more gradual buildup in intensity. There are no intermina- ble periods of breath holding, and overall, there’s a less frantic sound to it.

By about six weeks, the infant has gained enough control of his vocal cords that he makes the amazing discovery that he can cry at will. Imagine the power! He is learning that this vocal tool brings someone to his side. At this point, he may not be crying for a basic need like food or a clean diaper. He may be crying because he needs attention, something he received twenty-four hours a day in the uterus.

Attention is a serious need for infants. They may need a burp, they might have gas or indigestion, or they may be get- ting tired. They may be too warm. They may want to move— in someone’s arms, a rocking chair, a stroller, or a car seat gliding down the highway. They may simply be lonely and want the sound of a human voice or a cuddle. Or maybe it’s just that fussy time of the day, and all a parent can do is try to provide comfort as the crying runs its course. That kind of attention teaches him that a caring adult is still there for him, just as his mother was always there for him during the first three trimesters, in the happy times and through the inconsolable times.

Read More

The Newborn is Prepared

With a brain only about one-fourth ready, babies land right smack in the middle of a chaotic and messy real world. The soothing things the growing fetus had in the womb—the peace to sleep, a controlled space for exploring her own movements, the comforting external movements of her mother, the familiar muffled sounds of the household—have been abruptly snatched away. Parents and caregivers help with the transition by paying close attention to comfort. But modern science tells us that, even though the world is confusing to newborns, they’ve got amazing devices with which to begin sorting it all out, right from the very start.

Despite the newborn’s extreme immaturity, he is well pre- pared. He has at his disposal an arsenal of tools for himself; and some he’ll find himself using in response to signals from mother, father, or caregivers.

Survival for an infant in the fourth trimester means being constantly close to a nurturing caregiver—to the soothing touch, sound, odor, and radiated warmth provided by some- one who loves and pays close attention. Newborns are naturally built and equipped by evolution to prefer their mothers, though adopted infants have proven that their allegiance changes when it must. That closeness is a vital part of the transition from womb to world. Human babies pick up on movement patterns,

breathing sounds, and body heat, all of which begin to regu- late hormonal releases—melatonin to help manage the sleep- wake cycle and body temperature, and cortisol to regulate blood pressure, blood sugar, and immune response.

 

The kinds of behaviors that come naturally to parents and caregivers around the world are just what the baby needs. Rub- bing and massaging her back, stomach, or legs keeps the infant warm; stimulates respiration, digestion, and elimination; and calms her down. Mothers naturally hold their babies most often on the left side of their bodies, and babies love feeling the sooth- ing heartbeat. Mothers, fathers, and almost all adults talk in high-pitched voices when they speak to babies, and they look their babies in the eye. They’ve been doing these things for millions of years—exactly the things that newborns crave.

 

Just as the colt is born ready to stand, a human baby is born ready to recognize another human face, the smell of her mother’s milk, and the familiar sound of her voice. It’s precisely because human babies are so extremely neurologically immature at birth that they are exquisitely responsive to the body cues of adults, even to the point of matching the rhythm of breathing when they rest on a person’s chest. Fetal life has prepared the newborn to recognize these cues from another loving body, and the familiarity helps to ease the transition of the fourth trimes- ter. Babies have been responding to those instinctive touches, smells, and sounds since the first human put one foot in front of the other.

“We are all preemies at birth, relative to other primates. The baby is highly sensitized to gases the mother gives off,” says Dr. James McKenna, anthropologist and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame. “Every baby in the world—put them next to their mothers and they all do the same thing. They root. They breathe differently. The baby is waiting to respond to these kinds of things. They have come off a long evolutionary tree, and they know what to do.”

Evolution, biology, genetics, and the environment all help to fashion one special baby, far better than anything parents might have imagined. But the deep well of parental love won’t be returned in kind. Not yet. Babies need that love, can’t thrive without it; but at first, it’s all an infant can do to handle the new work of eating, breathing, and regulating her own heartbeat and digestion. She’s not yet ready to show any signs of returning the outpouring of love. It can seem like unrequited love, but the demands and frustrations of the first months do not represent a failure of parenting. It’s not personal. It’s simply biology. Parents have waited for a baby, and they’ve been handed a mysterious, not-fully-formed neonate. Patience. The baby’s brain, from the moment of birth, is beginning to mature, to figure out sleep- ing, seeing, hearing. It’s part of the dance of life—her cries, gri- maces, and involuntary smiles encouraging a parental response and paving the way for a two-way attachment.14 In time, she’ll begin to respond. And one day soon, she’ll smile, a reward making it all worthwhile.

Read More