It's a familiar scene: your newborn baby is crying inconsolably and you haven't the faintest idea why.
You've fed and burped the infant, checked its nappy (bone dry and sweet-smelling), tried a cuddle and some soothing music, yet the crying continues. You feel like crawling into a corner and crying yourself. You are not alone.
Coping with a squalling infant is one of the universal challenges facing all parents, particularly first-timers. It can be one of the most frustrating and frightening experiences, along with the joy and miracle of giving birth.
A Spanish father has now come to desperate parents' rescue with a natty little device, a "crying analyser" called WhyCry that claims to be a world first. The clinically tested product takes just a few seconds to interpret and translate a baby's sounds, from moans to full blown howls.
The device was launched in South Africa in December and promises to be an "invaluable help" to parents, with a success rate of 98 percent. All the marketing hype aside, if it had been around when I had my babies years ago, I would have snapped it up faster than they could have yelled "waaa!".
Parktown North housewife and mother Sandra Dicoski got hold of one about a year ago when her twins, Anastasia and Mihail, were a few months old. By that time Dicoski had already learned to interpret her children's crying bouts, but she thought it might be useful when she left them with a babysitter.
She was "very surprised" at how accurate WhyCry proved. "I don't understand how it works, but it confirmed what I knew my babies were crying about, and it worked for the sitters," she says.
The reality is that crying is one of the first signs that doctors and nurses look for to show that a newborn baby is healthy and alert. It is essential, necessary behaviour for babies because that's the way they communicate.
Researchers call crying "a fundamental and almost unique expression of the language of an unweaned baby during its first few months of life".
It represents a "rudimentary form of language, a first step towards communication".
Crying is the only way a baby has of telling you when it is hungry, tired, hot, nervous, wanting to play, has a dirty nappy, or is just plain bored.
It is also true that babies sometimes cry for no reason at all, just to get rid of excess energy as they begin to interact with the new environment outside the comforting confines of the womb.
Life outside can be pretty overwhelming for newborns, especially if they happen to be colicky.
But there's no getting away from the fact that babies are saying something when they cry, and parents can be reduced to a bundle of nervous tears trying to figure it all out.
It can take weeks or longer of listening closely and responding to a newborn baby's cries, before parents begin to feel anywhere close to cracking the code - if they haven't cracked already themselves.
There is pressure on parents to respond speedily and appropriately to their infants' crying. This is compounded by research suggesting that attending to a baby's needs early on is directly linked to the intelligence it will develop - that it will be 25 percent more intelligent and its IQ 10 points higher compared with babies whose parents fail to get the howling drift.
Research also suggests that responding swiftly to babies' cries contributes significantly to emotional development, creating a sense of security during the first few months that can carry through the rest of their lives.
Not surprisingly, that kind of research emanates mostly from the United States. Americans do seem to have cornered the market for research aimed at making parents feel vulnerable, stupid and inadequate. And of course it all makes marvellous grist for the marketing mill, and a perfect pitch for a product that claims to help parents swiftly make sense of a new baby's cries.
The device will indicate "crying patterns" that shows your child is either hungry, bored, annoyed or in pain, sleepy and stressed or colicky. The crying of a hungry baby, for example, is described as "energetic and demanding in tone". A stressed or colicky baby's cry starts as an intense short scream that decreases then increases again. A bored baby tends to start with moaning sounds.
While this device may prove useful, it is pricey at R699. Parents would do just as well to trust themselves more, listen to their intuition and be open to experimenting and learning the safe and cheap "special tricks" that work to soothe their fractious infants.
Tips to soothe crying babies
- Rock the baby gently in your arms while standing, or sitting in a rocking chair.
- Walk the baby in your arms or a pram.
- Stroke the baby's head and pat the back or chest.
- Wrap the baby snugly in a blanket.
- Sing or talk to your baby, or play soft music.
- Take the baby for a drive in the car.
- Burp the baby to relieve gas.
- Give him/her a warm bath.
- Change locations - from light to dark, or quiet to less quiet or vice versa.
- Run a vacuum cleaner - not over the baby of course, but in the room. Some swear by this. Others say they can calm their baby by putting it in a car seat or baby carrier on top of a running clothes dryer or washing machine. Naturally, you should never leave a child alone, for even a second on top of a running clothes dryer. The vibration can cause the baby seat to slide off and seriously injure the child.