We have already talked about the baby's crying, its possible reasons and the physical consequences of leaving it unattended. All this adds up to a clear recommendation: there are many Reasons why you should always attend to the crying of babies. However, it is worth doing an orderly review to help us focus when the crying can overwhelm us. Having clear things helps a lot, a lot, to know how to act. It is not a matter of manuals, but of knowing how to find our instinct and understand the baby.
The baby does not know how to communicate with words, he can only resort to nonverbal language. You will soon learn to smile to convey that you feel happy and well attended, with all your needs covered. But unpleasant things also happen to the child: cold, pain, hunger, exhaustion, excess stimuli and simply the need for physical contact. And when these feelings arrive they are overwhelming and for them there is no expected patience, they need attention to fix it and they need it soon. To tell us they only have one language: crying.
The lesson of trust
When the child is taken care of in his grief or his anger he learns that he has the right to express those feelings and that he will be heard. That supposes a clear incentive to continue advancing in the improvement of its communicative repertoire. If we listen to him when he cries, if we do not ignore him or scold him, he will understand that it is worth explaining that he does not feel well, and will refine his language while building his self-confidence as a person that matters to us and the confidence that We are going to listen to you.
He will reach a teenager knowing, if we have laid the right foundations and have maintained them over the years, that his parents respect his feelings and not only love him when he is happy, that they are also open to listen and address their problems. We cannot expect that a child we have silenced, punished or shaken when complaining about something, even if it was something that interfered with our routine or seemed silly to us, begins to trust us at 15. It is absolutely impossible.
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The importance of knowing accepted
Let's go back to the beginning, because it seems like a very important idea to emphasize. The child who is not attended to in his crying will learn that he is fully accepted, not only when we are pleased. Y learn to express your feelings of grief, fear and pain, to recognize them and to trust us to help them.
Then, when you have a problem with a partner, with a teacher, with a friend, with drugs, with the pressure of the environment to have sex without being prepared, you will go to people who know they have never failed you, who have always listened. But if we ignore your crying the message will be: I don't care, I better shut up and not bother, because nobody will come to save me.
Babies have the same rights as adults
For a baby to be afraid at night alone in his crib, to have a need to be hugging his mother, to feel his skin, that we cradle him to calm the impression of this new world so fast, exciting and sometimes hostile, it is as important as our adult problems And deserve that we make the case that we, when we cry of sorrow, fear or anger, would need to give us the person we love most in the world.
Can you imagine the helplessness of a baby who cries and nobody cares for? Or worse, the baby who cries and receives hostility, indifference and screaming. We can't keep thinking that it doesn't hurt as much as it would hurt us in the heart. If we put ourselves in their skin, if we empathize with them, we will understand all the great dismay and despair. They can't even go away, they can't talk, they can only hope that their crying moves us and we embrace them.
We would never leave a person who speaks to us unanswered but we consider it normal to ignore a child who cries, when in reality he is trying to tell us something. Although he does not know how to speak a child, he is a human being, he has no less rights than we do. Moreover, we have a duty to protect and take care of him as well as possible. Being older does not give us the right to ignore them, as we would not ignore an old man who would cry in his room in the middle of the night, much less shout at him to shut up at once or shake his wheelchair while ranting how heavy it is .
The simplest lesson
If we teach them that in their disappearance we had the right to ignore his crying, in his mind that message will be signaled: they have the right to ignore the disappeared. Compassion and empathy are not empty words, they are teachings that we can only convey by example and by living in our own flesh.
Actually, for those looking for tricks or good parenting manuals, we could explain things in a very simple way. Would I like to be treated like this if I were in the same situation as this crying baby? If the answer is no better not to try to justify anything, if we would not like to be helpless let us cry, do not do it. Is the most powerful and simple reason why crying babies should be addressed.
