Dads and Babies Can Cry

When Infants Cry for Stress Release

By Laura Paul

Tim Nabors' favorite trick to soothe his infant children was to turn on the water faucet. As a stay-at-home father, the Cincinnati, Ohio, resident was the one who would get up in the middle of the night to respond to Sara, 7, and Everett, 2, when they were babies.

"When the kids were very young, they would have the screaming fits at the same time every day, and I'd turn on the water in the kitchen and just stand there," says Nabors, the founder of Cincinnati Stay-at-Home Dads group. "It would work like magic, just the sound of the water faucet. It worked for both of our children. It was almost like you could turn it off and they would cry, turn it on and they would stop. Maybe being that young, the sound of water takes them back to the time when they were in their mom."

While fathers often try different approaches to help their babies stop crying, such as the old run-the-vacuum-cleaner trick or playing classical music, some experts suggest babies need to cry as a stress release.

Aletha Solter, a Swiss-American developmental psychologist living in Goleta, Calif., says not all crying is an indication of an immediate need. She believes infants very often cry because they need to release stress.

"What happens very often in my experience, I find that dads often feel rejected by their baby when the baby cries," says Solter, who is also a consultant and director of The Aware Parenting Institute and the author of Tears and Tantrums: What to Do When Babies and Children Cry (Shining Star Press, 1998) and The Aware Baby

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