It has been crying time in T&T for some time. After today, it’s going to be more crying here and up north, regardless of who wins the election. When the US sneezes, the Caribbean catches pneumonia. If adults cry, children cry even more, and babies most.
Many parents are still babies, so it might be appropriate to talk about babies crying. Crying is one of the ways adults communicate their emotions, but crying is normal in babies and not necessarily linked to emotions. No matter what we do, healthy babies will normally cry, on and off, for about a total of about two hours in a 24-hour period. No one knows why. Breastfed babies cry much less.
A common reason why babies cry is because adults leave them alone. Alone is separation, and separation is scary. No one likes to be alone. Solitude yes, but solitude is not being alone. One can have solitude in company, silent company, or the absence of unnecessary speech, but alone is when there is no warm body nearby, not even in spirit or memory.
My favourite modern psychologist, Dr Darcia Nunez, Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame, says “modern child separation”… produces … “desperation and distress,” which “are regularised to the degree that the child dissociates from self, others, and life, seeking pleasure and comfort in some non-human other (eg, security blanket, screens, food).”
The long-term outcome is the “warrior” child and adult, well described by Father Jerry Pantin here in T&T. In an article I wrote in 2002, I quoted him: “Father Jerry Pantin keeps maintaining that we are reproducing in our society the “conditions for the emergence of a male warrior class, viz, 1) Children reared apart from their mothers, 2) Male status determined by combat and sexual conquest, and, 3) Economic gain separated from what is needed to support one’s family and made into an end in itself.”
Father Pantin thinks the “seeds of crime and violence” start when the young child begins to be repeatedly beaten and rejected by his mother and that this atmosphere of violence continues as the child moves out into the wider society with its loss of community spirit and absence of role models to take the place of the lost parent.” Hosea 8:7 says, “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
Father Pantin warned us about that over 30 years ago. The poet Abdul Malick also mentions it in the prologue to his poem, The Whirlwind. “What trouble is this?” he asked. It’s the crying trouble, poet. Babies also cry when they are hungry or thirsty or their diapers need to be changed.
Those are fairly easy to diagnose. They cry when they are sick, and mothers can usually differentiate a hunger cry from a sick one. There is another type of crying that is especially irritating and can have serious consequences, causing maternal depression and even child abuse. It’s called colic or gripe in the Caribbean, and all sorts of medications, from “gripe water” to herb teas, are unnecessarily given to babies. Unnecessary but understandable because these babies seem to cry without cause.
Most of the time no one knows why, and occasionally some simple lab tests need to be done, especially if the baby is not putting on weight. Baby colic or gripe is normal and not related to the baby’s digestion, from where we got those unfortunate terms, with their connations of the intestinal pain many overweight adults suffer from. Babies are not small, farting, overweight adults.
In an effort to take away the emphasis on the abdomen, stop useless medication, and help mothers understand that they are not to blame for the crying, the new term for these babies is they are going through a period of PURPLE crying.
P stands for period, where crying starts around three weeks of age and stops around three months. U is unexpected. Crying comes and goes without a pattern. This troubles everyone except the experienced nurse and doctor. The baby also does not seem to care and continues to thrive while resisting (R) soothing, regardless of what is done. P is for the pain-like faces many babies adopt during the crying, except they are not in pain. L is for long-lasting.
A PURPLE baby will cry more than three hours a day, more than three days a week, and more than three weeks in a row. E is for evening, and all mothers know about that awful crying time.
As long as the baby is thriving, there is little to do. Swaddling, soothing, shushing, swinging, white noise, or a pacifier sometimes help. The best is always the warmth of a calm body or breast. That takes experience, but time ultimately soothes all ills.
