Mothers really do ID very specific messages from baby cries?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I just had a fun Skype chat with my adult son, whose 24th birthday is in a few days, in which he mentioned that the crows he feeds have a particular type of caw when he first puts out the food.

This led me to confess that when he was a tiny infant I could not distinguish specific messages in his cries. The books I read back then said that babies cry differently depending on whether they are hungry, uncomfortable, or sleepy, and that mothers instinctively know which kind of cry their baby is making.

But to be honest, I didn’t hear a distinction. If my son cried, I responded; there were generally enough environmental clues that I could successfully determine whether a diaper change was in order, he needed feeding, or whatever.

It may be worth noting that I employed a more “traditional” feeding method, used in natural societies where babies accompany their moms everywhere (typically into the fields, if we want to get all anthropological about it and consider societies where women tended agricultural lands most of the time) and are put to the breast quite often, for both food and comfort, not at rigid timed feeding intervals.

However, I’ve always felt slightly ashamed and incredulous that mothers other than me apparently hear their baby cry and go, “oh, she’s hungry!” or “oh, she needs a diaper change.”

Really? Everyone else does that? Was I a weirdo for not hearing a difference? Or was my son a weirdo for not crying “correctly”? Or both of us?

Anyway, he’s all grown up now and while he is definitely an unusual person, he is doing great: successful in a Ph.D. program he loves, in a stable relationship with his girlfriend, gets along great with both parents - my complaints (he doesn’t eat particularly healthily and I know his apartment is … infrequently cleaned) are trivial.

So I guess he survived. But was I really such an oddball that I didn’t distinguish his cries? I feel slightly guilty about it, even after all these years.

2

My experience (as a father not mother) was that yes you could distinguish between cries to some extent. I think people exaggerate the extent to which this is possible though. And I’d be the 1st to admit that I could be completely wrong. These things are notoriously hard to be objective about.

3

Babies and cats are similar in this respect - they make different noises and movements based on what’s going on, which is usually along the lines of “I want something” (food/attention/an object I can’t reach) or “I feel something” (happy/sad/frightened/uncomfortable). You can come to learn them over time, and likewise over time they will learn what gets the desired reaction from you.

But it’s an imperfect science, to be sure, and babies (and indeed cats) differ in what they do.

4

I’m a father, so it may be different for moms, but I was a pretty hands-on dad (my wife may not strongly agree with that statement) and I don’t remember either of my two kids making different cries. It was just basic troubleshooting protocol:

Baby thing is making alarm sounds. What is wrong?

Diaper change needed? Y N
Bottle required? Y N
Basic comforting? Y N

90% of the time one or more of those would do it. If not, I’d move on to level 2 troubleshooting: take temperature, visually examine for anything that might be causing physical discomfort like pinching diaper, etc.

5

Yep, this. For both kiddos.

6

I couldn’t tell with my daughter, apart from knowing when she was really pissed off. Nor could I tell for my granddaughter or now with my grandson. But babies operate on a pretty simple level - food, sleep, diaper. It helps narrow the possibilities.

7

With our two they definitely did have different ways of making themselves heard for different reasons and the majority of the time our diagnosis was correct but it was from perfect.
I can easily see a situation where either a child doesn’t make it so obvious or a parent isn’t quite as perceptive. Neither is a failing, kids and parents are human after all.
I wonder as well whether much of the information for the diagnosis comes from either the run-up to the bawling or the knowledge you already have about the current situation.
i.e. one of ours, when asleep but almost ready for a feed, would start to make little grunty noises for about 10 minutes before commencing full-on Armageddon. We noted this and was able to forestall the crying.
However, the other one went from sleep to shriek in 10 seconds flat, no warning at all, but the fact that he did this regularly and the fact that the little bugger was always hungry after a sleep meant little decoding was needed. Shove a boob in there and all was sorted.

8

As a Dad, I could tell. Really, the big difference is a ‘regular’ cry (she’s hungry/being fussy) and a ‘real’ cry (something is wrong with the baby!). That we picked up on very closely.

9

I would have said it’s a lot more like dogs barking than anything else. When I was a kid, I could tell by the way my dog would bark whether he had to go outside to use the bathroom, or if he was hungry, or if he was (in his mind) defending the home against some interloper. All of the barks sounded different, even though they were all dog barks.

Babies are much the same- they cry differently when they are hungry, angry, tired, angry/tired, wet/poopy, and so on. It’s a tone and pattern sort of thing that was easy enough to pick up as a father, much less a mother who’s likely biologically attuned to that sort of thing.

Think about it… you’ll be in a public space and hear a baby cry, and it’s not at all uncommon to hear another woman (not the kid’s mom) comment that it’s a tired baby they’re hearing. Why? Because it’s distinctive and somewhat universal.

10

That was my memory as a dad of two newborns, that there was at least an “I’m grumpy/sleepy/uncomfortable [like wet my diaper]” cry, and an “I’m in pain/serious distress” cry. I don’t think I could distinguish much beyond those two generalties, though, and it may be subject to confirmation bias. The facial expression also I recall as being different in the two cries. It is similar with my dog. There’s a “hi!” bark or “what’s that?!” curious bark and a “who the hell does that dog think he is walking across my sidewalk and peeing on my grass” or “FedEx is here!” bark. Also backed up with different physical expressions, but discernible from sound alone.

11

Yes, there can be a discernable difference in cries. There is, however, a range of babies as well as a range of parents. One baby’s cries might be very distinct and another’s cries all sound more or less the same. Same with parents, if someone has trouble judging tones of voice in adults they might be less able to pick out different cries in babies.
Our little one had very distinct cries. We didn’t even need to be in the room. She would be set off and we would look at each other and say (“diaper”, “hungry”, “pissed off”. etc.).

12

That’s what I find especially odd about my experience - I have an exceptional ability to identify people by their voices. It seems normal to me and I’m always surprised that other people can’t do it - back before caller ID, this story happened constantly: the phone would ring, I’d say “hello” and the person on the other end would say, “hi, is Carol there?” and I’d say, “this is she, hi Tom!” and Tom would say “how did you know it was me?” but given that I’d just heard them speak, I was always surprised that THEY were surprised.

So, in my case it wasn’t inability to distinguish tone or timbre.

ETA: I can tell my cats apart by their vocalizations, too. I have three and if one of them meows or purrs in the dark, or in another room, I know which is which.

13

I don’t have kids, but I can tell my dog’s barks apart.

One time he was trapped in the side yard and his bark told me right away something was wrong. It was that different.

People ask, what is your dog’s name for you? It’s the sound they make when they are trapped in the side yard.

14

I don’t agree with the “instinctive” part of this.
It’s instinctive that all humans, mothers, fathers, unrelated childless bystanders, have a reaction to a baby crying.* But I think the ability to distinguish the different types of cries and their meaning is a learned behavior – mothers (and often fathers) comes from frequent reacting to them, and seeing which action makes the crying stop.

  • This partially explains the upset reactions of people to a baby crying in public, especially in a location where they will all be confined together in an enclosed space for a period of time (like a crying baby on a plane or train).
15

Apparently so. I’ve never even been pregnant, and hearing a distressed baby or small child has me looking for the source of the sound so I can help.

16

There is something called Dunstan baby language that attempts to identify different sounds babies make for different needs. It focuses on the sounds made just before crying rather than the crying itself. The article discusses several clinical studies that had positive results.

17

My son basically cried (screamed, really) pretty much 25/8 until we Ferberized him at 3 months, and there rarely seemed to be any reason for it. No different cries, he didn’t care if his diaper was soaked, etc. He was fully breastfed, and so my usual response when he screamed was to offer that (and hope like hell he’d go for it, as the only other reliable way to stop it was to go for a drive in the car).

Well, the one different scream was when he got his shots at the pediatrician. There was definitely a wail of pain, shock and betrayal that was different from any other sound he made. Luckily, the “mom bomb” generally soothed him quite quickly then.

With my daughter, it was much the same. She didn’t have the 24 hour a day colic from hell, but was difficult to soothe and didn’t sleep much better than her brother.

18

Your story has a lot of familiar components, especially that part! Now that I think back on it, he did - until he was 4 or 5 - have a special screech of unmitigated terror that emerged only when the needle came out. I have many stories, including the time a pediatrician kicked us out of the office without vaccinating him, and the time he ran into the reception area and hid behind the furniture.

I’m cracking up remembering it now, but at the time it was Not. Funny. At. All.

19

I couldn’t distinguish the cries, but I eventually learned how to fix whatever the problem was. As countless others have discovered, a baby will cry for one of these reasons most (90%?) of the time:

  1. Dirty diaper.
  2. Hungry or thirsty.
  3. Tired.

So it simply becomes a process of elimination.

If none of those work, you have to look at other possibilities (illness, other physical discomfort, frightened of something, etc.).

20

The problem with self reporting by parents is that they know too much. You know if the baby has fed, slept, or pooped recently so you have a whole bunch of cues as to what may be wrong other than the cry itself. You might believe you can tell from the cry but there’s no good way to test if it is actually true or not.