that knows how to get those needs met.
Another unrealistic expectation many new parents have is that babies will soothe themselves to sleep with the help of a dummy, a musical box, or some baby-calming gadget. High-need babies won’t accept that. They need to interact with people, not things. Parents will often report, “He just can’t relax by himself.” Most babies need help to fall asleep. A parent who rocks, jiggles, walks, or dances with a baby at bedtime acts like a shock absorber for the day’s stimulation and frustration. High-need babies must learn to trust their parents to help them. This will help them learn to relax on their own, a skill that has value for a lifetime. Crying oneself off to sleep is not a good way to learn to relax. The best way for a baby to learn to relax and fall asleep is to have his behaviour shaped for him by a parent. Once a child learns to relax on his own, he’ll have no trouble falling asleep on his own.
The quality of wanting people instead of things as comforters, while initially exhausting, will eventually work to the child’s advantage. The child will have a better grasp on interpersonal relationships, especially being comfortable with the quality of intimacy. (See the related section on intimacy on page 219.)
We learned early on that Amy was a people person. She preferred anything human to anything synthetic or mechanical. We tried a host of different things designed to soothe or entertain small infants, but Amy would have none of them. At our childbirth class reunion, all the other babies seemed quiet and content, sitting in infant seats or lying peacefully on the floor. Amy wanted and needed to be in our arms. That day, we got a lot of suggestions about ways to help her. Many other parents were extolling the virtues of the mechanical swing, telling of the many hours their baby would spend in it. Babies who had not tried one were put in the host’s swing and almost always promptly fell asleep. We dutifully tried Amy in it and she cried immediately. Over the months that followed, we learned in no uncertain terms that she preferred arms to the cradle and the breast to the bottle. We came to respect this tendency in her. The pushchair, the cradle, the infant seats were all put away until she signalled that she was ready to be more physically separate from us. Now, at nearly a year old, she sleeps peacefully on a futon at naptime and loves taking rides in the pushchair and backpack. That time of needing intense physical contact was quite short. We’re proud that we were able to be there for her in the way that she needed us to be.
The song “Only You” could be the theme of most high-need babies. These infants do not readily accept substitute care and are notoriously slow to warm up to strangers. As a mother of a clingy baby described it, “Amanda didn’t like new people or new places and seemed to be in a continual phase of separation anxiety. Baby-sitters wouldn’t watch her because of her reputation as a screamer. This was hard on me because I desperately needed a break from the intensity of my child.”
better early than late
Needs that are met early in life go away. Needs that are left unmet never entirely disappear. Instead, the child can follow one of several paths. He can go through life with lower expectations and resign himself to an unfulfilled life. He can spend his life coping on his own and never learn to use the resources of others. Or, he can live a life of anger that the responses he expected were not the responses he got. He will always be searching without really knowing what he is searching for. It’s a case of “parent me now” or “parent me later”. Therapists’ offices are filled with high-need adults in search of re-parenting.
It helps to see separation from the baby’s viewpoint. To most adults, especially those of the “babies must learn to be independent” mind-set, baby and mother should be separate people, able to function on their own. Babies don’t see it that way. In their minds, mother is a part of them, and they are part of mother. Mother and baby are one, a complete package. These babies feel right when they feel at one with mother; they feel anxious and frightened when not with mother. Adults dub this completely normal behaviour “separation anxiety”. In reality, these emotions are normal feelings inside a little person who knows that he needs the presence of his mother to thrive and to feel complete. Labels such as “stranger anxiety” or “separation anxiety” are adult jargon, reflecting our expectations of how we want babies to act for our own convenience, not how babies really are, or what they really need.
We have observed that mothers who spend the early months practising what we call attachment parenting (wearing their baby many hours a day in a sling, breast-feeding on cue, taking their babies with them wherever they go, and often sleeping with baby) themselves experience separation anxiety when not with their baby. If this anxiety appears in normal mothers, shouldn’t it also be normal in babies? Fortunately, high-need babies have powerful personalities to tell us when things are not right.
Your baby’s quality of being very selective about who cares for her shows that she is highly discerning. High-need babies know which situations and which people they can trust to meet their needs, and they protest if these expectations are not met. Loud separation protests also reveal that these babies have a capacity for forming deep attachments – if they didn’t care deeply, they wouldn’t fuss so loudly when separated. This capacity is the forerunner of intimacy in adult relationships.
Eventually, the infant’s care-giving circle will grow to include people other than mother. The concept of weaning can be applied to more areas than just the breast or bottle. It also means letting go of exclusive relationships. When a new baby comes along, for example, the older one by necessity must begin to wean from mother to father (if she hasn’t started already). Our own high-need babies were willing to stay happily with people other than Martha by age three and a half, and sooner than that if that person was someone to whom they were already strongly attached (father, sibling, close friend of mother’s, grandparent). Our youngest daughter, Lauren, was given a videotape when she was about two years and nine months old that included a song entitled “Mama Comes Back.” It was her favourite part of the video. She liked Martha to sing the song for her at bedtime over and over. We were still having trouble leaving her happily behind when we went out, and one night we again faced a tearful Lauren who didn’t want Martha to leave. Remembering how much Lauren liked this song, Martha suggested that because she was leaving, she’d put on “Mama Comes Back” for her. Her face instantly brightened and she clicked on to that idea and ran happily to watch the video, secure in the reassurance that Mummy would come back.
growing out of it
Will he ever stop fussing? Will she ever sleep through the night? When will the colic stop? Will I ever get my wife back? The good news is that, yes, babies do grow out of their difficult-to-manage behaviours and grow into more manageable ones. Write the following survival motto on a piece of paper and hang it on your wall: THIS TOO WILL PASS.
There are many milestones in the first two years of a child’s life that bring with them improvements in behaviour and feelings of relief for parents. Within a month, babies can see images a foot away quite clearly, allowing baby to be soothed by eye-to-eye contact with a familiar, caring face. Increasing visual acuity between one to three months allows babies to be happily distracted by moving objects at increasing distances; watching a hand move or their reflection in a mirror will fascinate them. The first truly magical turning point is around three to four months, when many babies enter the promised land of fuss-free living. (High-need babies just don’t get very far across the border!) At this age, they often develop more internal organization of their sleeping and waking patterns. The ability to see clearly across the room can be distracting enough that they forget to fuss. Also, between three and four months some babies find their thumb to soothe themselves, and all of them discover the entertainment value of their hands and fingers. Between four and six months,