Hah - when I was young, I started on allergy shots - in fact, one of my earliest memories was at the allergist, being tested, and being understandably VERY upset (the process has improved a lot since then; it was pretty barbaric at the time, involving one little injection after another, for everything they were testing).
So after that i had to have regular injections. My mother said that at one point, it was twice a week. Naturally, I disapproved, and cried every time.
Until one day, not long before my 5th birthday, I FOUGHT LIKE HELL. Grabbing onto furniture in the waiting room, thrashing, you name it. Mom was literally dragging me back. Partway through a door, I stopped crying for a moment, announced “when I’m 5, I won’t cry any more when I get my shot”. And immediately resumed the tantrum.
And by golly, when I turned 5, i quit crying.
I have to think my mother was torn between laughing at me, and knocking me into the middle of next week. As I recall, she did neither (the whole episode is stunningly vivid in my mind, nearly 60 years later).
In Dweezil’s case, eliminating the other causes never led to anything obvious. He simply screamed for no reason, as far as we could tell. We tried eliminating most foods from my diet (in case secondhand food components were causing him distress) but nothing obvious came of it. We gave him simethicone in case it was gas pains (again, nothing obvious, though he did seem to fart more). Fatigue was likely a component, as his mood improved somewhat when we Ferberized him at 3 months - he was cranky because he was tired, and he was tired because he was too cranky to fall asleep - any attempt to soothe him failed, and putting him in his crib to sleep led to horrifying screams. Scary combo for everyone involved.
In his case, when we figured out he was on the autistic spectrum, so very much of that made sense, as self-regulating is one of the issues these kids have.
An interesting somewhat related item is maternal ability to specifically identify their babies by smell.
As the study was initially told to me fathers could not do this but mothers could. When I had told my wife that the many years ago after I first read it her reaction was absolute shock that I had not been able to tell our babies’ smell apart from other babies. To her it was of course she could tell her baby’s distinct smell.
All I can find though is the one for the mothers:
And looking for that I stumbled on this very interesting separate bit:
This part of the artcle is fascinating -
No conscious perception of the odor but dramatic sex-linked differences in both behavior and brain activation patterns between fathers and mothers after a baby’s birth.
Humans like other mammals have a small structure in the nose that is different that the rest of the olfactory system (labelled “the accessory olfaction system”) called the vomeronasal organ (VNO), sometimes referred to as “Jacobson’s Organ.” It is unclear what it does in humans, if anything, and it seems to have no role in conscious odor perception. Some speculate that it has sexual and social functions in humans. But in sheep the VNO is critical for ewes recognizing their own lambs …
Just curious how those of us who have been parents stack up. And IF you are someone who could tell your baby’s smell from others, and you have one or more grandchildren, can you tell THEIR smell from other babies?
I do think I could tell my daughter’s and stepdaughter’s cries as to whether they were hungry, bored, tired, or half-asleep and half-tired. Sometimes it could get more nuanced than that - they both occasionally did anguished cries while being deeply asleep.
My daughter was fed in pretty much the same way you mention, just because it worked for me. My stepdaughter was very rarely ten feet from a milk-making boob or a bottle, and was quickly fed; waiting wasn’t the factor.
But that’s only two kids that I’m certain about.
With other kids the tired cry is usually more obvious - it’s sort of whiny as opposed to WAAA WAAA FEED ME NOW! That’s the sort of thing people are probably talking about, and it really is very obvious.
But that’s for most babies, and that doesn’t mean 100% of them. I do have a friend whose baby was just really quiet and did the tired cry when you’d expect the hungry cry. Said child never had any trouble vocalising once she’d learned to talk, though.
I can’t vote because it’s been more than two decades since my spawn emanated baby smell and I just don’t remember. (His unwashed sweaty adolescent boy armpit and foot odor, on the other hand, remains a deeply traumatic memory … I am SO GLAD those glands settled down when puberty was complete. )
Also, I wasn’t in a position to smell other babies … we were kind of isolated in Mozambique at the time, and the only other babies I saw were the three in his playgroup, all firmly attached to their mothers; I’m sure I picked up the other babies once in a while if mom ran off to the bathroom or something, but I doubt I really ever smelled them!
My guess is that I could have instantly identified my baby in a blind smell test. However, I have an uncannily good sense of smell, so that’s the reason rather than any special maternal ability.
I’m not a parent, so maybe this is a naive question, but do many parents spend much time smelling other people’s babies? Outside of mom or dad doing childcare for a living, it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing people would do without an experimenter prompting them to do so…
In the not too distant past we were around other people including other people with babies fairly frequently and babies were not typically isolated in their car seats but were held … other parents often holding other parent’s kids to help out.
I am not very scent aware myself but apparently to new moms in particular there is a baby smell, that like a new car smell, is one they notice.
)