After having been awakened from a nap this afternoon by a neighbor’s kid who just learned she could scream just like in the horror movies, I got to thinking about kids & babies.
Why do they scream, and why do they scream so loud? I thought the idea was to stay quiet when Mom wasn’t around, so as not to get eaten? The babies I’ve encountered certainly aren’t starving, that’s for sure.
What did moms do before we invented diapers or cloth & kids hadn’t yet learned bladder & bowel control? Maybe that’s why they moved camp all the time? I would.
Babies scream because they can. A human infants means of communication are fairly limited after all.
Also, David Brin once pointed out that human infants don’t have to sit quiet in the tall grass because their parents are the meanest and scariest creatures in the world.
On the subject of pampers I can’t give much direction except to say I once read that native american mothers used baskets filled with corn husks to control the ‘emissions’.
Babies will use EVERY means of communication available to them. It’s just that at first, the really only have one option.
In other cultures without our natural resources (Huggies), mothers might carry their babies all day. So I’m sure they came up with some sort of binding or loincloth.
But what about before we invented cloth? I know from experience that a human baby can excrete twice its body weight in poop, per day, in a wild range of consistencies. How they manage to do this is a mystery to me, tho.
Yeah, that sorta makes sense. A bunch of crazy humans armed with sticks, rocks & possibly fire would scare me, too.
Hollering is a baby’s only way of expressing itself, calling for help, etc.
Also, at a certain age they start to figure out they can make cool noises. Loudly. That’s when you stock up on the takeout menus because you’re not going out to a restaurant again with the little critter until that phase passes.
I’ve heard (but not confirmed in any way) that mothers in cultures where diapers are not applied to infants can sense when their baby is about to urinate or have a bowel movement and they hold them out, away from their bodies, before it happens. I don’t know how plausible this is, but I do know that by the time my own (diapered) infant was a month old, I could usually tell when she was about to have a bowel movement just by the look of concentration on her face.
My 6 week old daughter is already starting to grunt and squirm right before she poops. I’m sure the pay attention and hold the baby out when she poops method doesn’t work all the time, but it might work most of the time.
Also, a human baby isn’t designed to be put down. A human baby, like all other primates, always stays with it’s mother. If you are on the Serengeti plain and you put your baby down to take a break for a few minutes, your baby probably won’t be there when you come back. A baby separated from its mother will scream until the mother picks it up. And evolution has made baby screaming intolerable to adult humans. Why do you think kids have nightmares about monsters under the bed? Because for 99.9% of human evolution, it wasn’t safe for children to sleep alone. There really WERE monsters out there, or at least wolves, bears, lions and hyaenas. The screaming is simultaneously a demand for mom to pick the kid up, and a warning to the hyaenas that mom is around. And you DON’T want to get mom pissed.
I was watching some show on the Discovery Channel, talking about an African tribe who never put their babies down (except perhaps while sleeping, I can’t remember) until they were 6 months old. There was a big ceremony the first time the kid’s feet touched the ground.
Makes for VERY well-adjusted babie who don’t cry as much. Nowadays, we use slings and co-sleeping to get the same effect.
Babies scream for all of the reasons named above. If you’re talking about a slightly older kid (say, 2 years old) who screams, it’s probably because said kid has figured out that screaming like that gets him/her some kind of reaction. Kids that age LOVE cause and effect. If a peircing scream can cause mom to make a face that looks like someone is driving long nails into her ear canal, that’s cool. If same screaming can make mom give in on ANYTHING because she can’t stand the screaming, that’s even cooler.
As for diapers, this is just my WAG: In the Earth’s Children books, Jean Auel puts forth the idea that cave-women used really soft pieces of leather as feminin napkins. I’m guessing pelts or skins could have been used as primitive diapers, too, no?
We have a five month old, and he gets annoyed if you hold him all the time. He has the occasional day where he needs to be held all day, but for the most part, he’d rather be on the floor where he can wiggle, and roll around, or just kick back and relax.
I don’t know though. My kids different. Other than his fussy days, he’s always smiling and laughing. He pretty much only cries when he needs changed or when its time to eat. He’s even slept through the night since he was a few weeks old. He’s so good his mom and I talk about having another one, but then we figure the odds of us having TWO good babies aren’t real good. lol
Do you really think co-sleeping and carrying the baby around ALL the time really makes for a well adjusted baby? I’ve seen older kids who were coddled all their lives and they weren’t very well
adjusted.
nitroglycerine: Your son sounds a lot like Aaron. [sub]Where in PA do you live? We live near Harrisburg[/sub]
Aaron does not feel the need to scream that often. When he does, it’s for a reason. He’s hungry, crabby, or has a dirty diaper or is afraid or in pain. Period. The first three are remedied immediately; the second two take a little time but are generally fixable with a little comforting and patience and maybe some baby Tylenol.
I’m in that inbred-white trash-junkie-crackhead infested shithole otherwise known as Altoona, MsRobyn. I had planned on getting my family out of this place with my 280 million dollar powerball winnings, but…:smack: