Not everyone responds in the same way to the crying of a baby. There are people who suffer a lot when they hear a baby cry because they feel it is going wrong and there are people who suffer because crying bothers them, makes them feel bad. Then there are other people who, for whatever reason, have managed to deactivate their instincts and are able to withstand the sound of a crying baby and not do anything special to silence him, perhaps because someone has explained that children should not be made a lot of case, maybe because they really are not able to feel that they should do something.
Before that, before the advice and lessons, the response of each person depends on many aspects. According to a recent study, that response is largely determined by the experiences of our childhood. That is, if you are pregnant or if you will soon be a father and would you like to know how you will respond to the crying of your baby, do a little memory and check how was your childhood.
Study Data
The study was done with 259 women who had their first child. They analyzed their behavior from the moment the baby was born until he was six months old. Already during pregnancy they were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their personality and about how his childhood had been and how the relationship with their parents and with the people who raised them. After this they should watch some videos of children crying. After viewing they were asked to explain what they thought and what they felt about the images they had seen.
The researchers, from the School of Health and Human Sciences at the University of North Carolina, in the US, saw that women with positive childhood experiences expressed feelings about the child's discomfort and the possible cause of crying. Instead, those who had had a more complicated childhood, with more negative experiences, talked about feelings more related to themselves, with the discomfort that the crying caused them, more than what the baby could feel. Of all the mothers, those who currently had symptoms of depression or difficulties in controlling their emotions responded in the same way.
A few months later, when the women had already been mothers, the experiment was repeated with the crying of their own children. The results were the same as before being mothers.
Esther Leerkes, one of the authors of the study, says the following:
Some mothers need help to control the anguish that crying causes them, and that does not allow them to interpret what the child is experiencing..
Emotional memories of childhood
And that anguish of which he speaks can be, very probably, and as they tell us in El Comercio, the memory of old wounds, of past experiences, of childhood, which then did not heal and that were open forever. Every event that can remember the past, our childhood, if it was negative, becomes painful.
It is not something entirely conscious, it is an experience that evokes the past and it makes us feel the same sensations as when we were little: the heart that accelerates, the feeling of loneliness, of injustice, of fragility, of being again tiny with respect to what is happening around and again susceptible to being hurt. And everything that causes us that feeling tends to be rejected, so much so that it is known that, in the most extreme cases, many of the abuse of parents to children have the mission of silencing the baby to stop feeling everything said.
What am i talking about? Of mothers and fathers who shake the baby, who hit or do things that I can't or want to imagine while they ask for it, they yell at him, to shut up, to stop crying, that enough is enough to complain about, that those cries, that Noise makes them feel bad and they are not able to bear it.
Leerkes already comments, many parents and many mothers may need help to understand why the crying of their children does not make them think about what may be happening to the baby, but instead focuses on their adult feelings. They must be able to know that feeling, to understand it, to put it in perspective and to know why it occurs ("I feel this because as a child things happened to me that I still have latent and that I have not overcome") and from there try to build a action in which you can respond to the child's crying in order to help him and not us parents.
What we do with our children will influence the parents who will be
On the other hand, we can also read this study based on the future, looking at the type of people or caregivers (or of fathers and mothers) that they will be our children when they grow up. If women with more positive childhoods tend to be more empathetic and think more about the baby's needs and how to calm him than the others, it seems clear that we should try to get our children to have good memories of their childhood.
I'm not talking about buying gifts, or hundreds of toys, or anything like that. This is not about the material. I speak of respect, of treating them well, to talk with them, to spend time with them, playing, interacting, explaining things so that they see what is right and what is wrong. In other words, give them an education, help them to be part of the world in which they live but always thinking about treating them as we would have liked to be treated as children, if our childhood is not considered positive.
That is how it is achieved that children with sufficient confidence in their possibilities and with high self-esteem, children who feel respected, grow up and become balanced adults, able to understand that a baby is a totally dependent small creature that at birth He needs them more than anything in the world.
