Their baby learning to self-soothe might be the most desirable goal of many sleep-deprived parents in the U. S. It’s also one of the biggest lies of the Western parenting world.
I have pseudo triplets with my wife (she carried a singleton, I carried twins, due dates 10 days apart) and when the twins had colic and screamed for hours on end every day for months, it was so hard.
Was something wrong? Were they in pain? Why couldn’t I stop them from crying, no matter how many soothing colic tricks I tried? I felt like I was failing as a parent. Sometimes, holding two crying babies, I’d just be crying myself.
I wish I knew then what I knew now: that stopping my babies from crying isn’t my job — but that I have a much more accessible and much more helpful job instead while they’re screaming: either providing them a bridge from dysregulation to regulation, or providing them a buffer from the cortisol of crying.
Coregulation over self-regulation
The area of the brain responsible for self-soothing is the prefrontal cortex, which doesn’t even begin to develop until toddlerhood (usually around 3).
Self-soothing or self-regulation — a person’s ability to calm themselves down after becoming stressed or activated — is impossible for a person to achieve without a prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex slows and stops the stress response. Without this, a brain can’t stop stress.
Babies literally can’t self-soothe because their prefronal cortex is nowhere near developed. But babies developed a fantastic system to help them out in the meantime.
They are designed to coregulate, rather than self-regulate. When they become stressed, scared, or otherwise dysregulated, they signal (cry, whine, reach) for a caregiver to lend them the caregiver’s mature, regulated system and help them learn to calm down.
A baby’s cry is designed to keep their caregivers close. Babies are incredibly sensitive, very new to this world, and think many things could be dangerous to their tiny bodies. So they want to constantly keep their caregivers near.
People may tell you: “But if you just leave them alone, they’ll learn to self-soothe!” No, remember “self-soothing” is physically and neurologically not possible right now. Or,
“But after letting my baby cry it out at night, they learned to sleep through the night.” No, the baby learned to stop signalling for their caregiver.
Is crying it out the answer?
Compelling and concerning recent studies show that many methods of sleep training — a practice praised by sleep training advocates everywhere to get your baby to sleep through the night (or most of it) and bring health and happiness to your entire family–doesn’t teach your baby to sleep.
Instead, many cry-it-out sleep methods (any that advocate leaving your baby to cry without responding to them with touch and soft words) teaches them to stop trying to contact you when they wake up.
When a caregiver does a cry-it-out method, the baby is shown to wake up just as many times throughout the night, and experience cortisol levels that elevate to the same level as if they woke up and cried. But once the baby learns that when they cry, no one comes, the baby goes into survival mode to conserve their energy, where they go into a “freeze state” where they become quiet and still because they “cannot tolerate the intensity of the stress”, and finally they go to sleep. This is an old survival mechanism because a baby is more likely to survive predators if they are quiet when they are alone. But being left alone to cry trains the baby’s stress system to be reactive and overloaded.
Now I want to qualify this by saying: Sleep training can encompass a variety of methods, including methods as gentle as implementing a bedtime routine, or being flexible about sleep times to follow your baby’s sleep cues. Gentle versions of sleep training such as these aren’t implicated as developmentally unideal or harmful. It’s the methods that encourage leaving your baby to cry that are implicated as developmentally inappropriate.
Staying safe
Also, the most important thing is that your baby’s body and your body are safe. Colic or excessive cries are shown to heighten a parent’s risk of postpartum depression and a baby’s risk of shaken baby syndrome. If you are feeling overwhelmed or angry, it is the best option to put your baby in a safe place (like a crib) and walk away until you are able to regulate yourself. Yes, even if that means leaving the baby to scream by themselves.
As long as you come back to your baby and “repair” by giving them loving attention and helping them feel secure, they will be absolutely fine — and it is most important to keep everyone safe!
“When parents feel frustrated, I want them to know that it is OK for them to walk away and take a break to prevent losing control and shaking the baby,” said Dr. Ghada Harsouni, a board certified pediatrician and lactation consultant who is the founder of Honeybee Pediatrics and Lactation in Ann Arbor. “Leave the baby in a safe area or with a person you trust and take a break.”
And lastly, as our article touching on America’s poor parent support system shows, so many parents need to do some sort of sleep training because they they both need to work, they have no support system, or their mental health is struggling and they’re simply exhausted. This is not a failure on parents; this is a failure on our society, for not valuing the sacred work of parenthood and supporting them.
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PURPLE crying
“Baby screaming can be so triggering. I do believe the screams can be worse for a parent,” said Harsouni. “There is a concept developed by Dr. Ronald Barr, called PURPLE crying. It was developed to help parents know about normal crying behavior and avoid the danger of shaking babies.”
PURPLE is an acronym that stands for:
Peak of crying (can be at each week, the most at two months, then less around four months);
Unexpected (can come and go and we won’t know why);
Resists soothing;
Pain-like face;
Long lasting (can be up to 5 hours a day);
Evening.
Harsouni said that when a baby is colicky or just keeps crying, “My recommendations are to check and see if the baby is hungry, tired, overstimulated, needs changing etc. I recommend rhythmic motion (taking the baby for a ride in the car, walk, dancing with baby), rhythmic sound (white noise, dripping water noise, lullabies), touches that can soothe (skin-to-skin, warm bath, massage) and sights (mirrors, silly faces, TV if needed only for that moment). Of course, if this does not help and you’re concerned the baby’s cry is abnormal, it is important to run it by the pediatrician.”
With my triplets, I certainly had times where I tried all the tricks, and the babies fell more into the “PURPLE” crying. Sometimes tricks worked–but sometimes I could not settle them, no matter how many tricks I tried.
Providing a bridge
Sometimes I needed to put a screaming baby down for a few minutes or hand them to someone else and walk away to splash cold water on my face and take a deep breath.
It’s an unfortunate truth that we can’t force our babies to be happy, anymore than we can force our friends or spouse to be happy.
So it’s not our job to make our babies be happy. It’s not even our job to make them be regulated. They’re people, just like our friends and spouse are people: we can’t make grownups be regulated either.
But we can provide a space for them to become regulated if they wish. We can use our nervous system to provide a bridge for them from dysregulation to regulation.
Our babies don’t have a bridge between “oh no! A threat!” and “ahhh, I’m safe.” They can’t get from “stress” to “safe” without us providing the missing link (our prefrontal cortex) for their brains.
We can’t force them to go across this bridge, but it is our job to build it so it’s available when they choose to go across it.
How do we provide this bridge for our children? When you hold your baby, their brain is bathed in dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins: all nurturing hormones.
If an infant is left alone in their stress, their brain is bathed in cortisol. If this happens repeatedly (not just a couple times when you need to put the baby down to take a breath and be safe, but as a habit), their brain becomes wired to be reactive and stressed.
But simply holding our baby and speaking gently to them calms our baby, releases oxytocin, and helps them feel safe.
And, if your baby is unable to cross the bridge between dysregulation and regulation at any moment, you can be assured that when a baby is “lovingly held by parents, oxytocin inhibits the stress response, and the amygdala is silenced, which prevents the stress system from getting activated. Infants don’t have stress responses when close to parents! They can cry and show distress, but the oxytocin that [your] nurture gives them buffers the stress response internally.”
Skin to skin
So even if your colicky or screaming baby continues to scream, you can be affirmed that holding your baby and speaking gently to them still helps comfort and soothe them, even if all the external factors are the same. Bonus points if holding them involves your bare skin on theirs.
Harsouni said, “Skin to skin is so beneficial. It is shown that early skin to skin (and nipple stimulation) during the first hour of life, and beyond can improve breast milk production. I recommend doing this at home. There are so many baby carriers nowadays that have improved. If you are out in public, it can be enough that the baby’s arms and head are in contact with your chest. At home, I recommend attempting to maximize when you are able.”
It comforted me to know that stress wasn’t bad in and of itself. In fact, experiencing stressors and learning how to feel safe again is a vital part in learning how to be resilient. Stress, for a baby, is only bad if they are left alone with it.
I’m not going to pretend it’s easy. Sometimes my own nervous system became so frazzled that I had to get out my noise cancelling headphones and turn up a loud song to soften the crying so I could continue to hold a baby in their distress.
But once I released myself from the expectation of it being my job to stop them crying, and instead began to focus on nurturing them through the stress (which was the only thing I could control), I found my own anxiety lessening.
It’s my job to love my babies. To hold them and help them feel safe. Give myself some grace when they’re crying and it’s hard. And then hold them all over again.
