Mum:
“I started Aware Parenting when my baby was 4 months old. How much do babies need to cry in arms, and how long does it take them to “catch up” if we have unknowingly stopped them from expressing their feelings in the first months?”
Marion:
My general perspective is that pretty much ALL babies have some feelings to release before pretty much every sleep for about the first year.
For some babies, this may only be a small amount per day, for example half an hour in total; for other babies, especially those who have experienced any challenges during birth or in the early postpartum period, then this may be several hours per day.
For all babies, the most amount of crying (if listened to and not stopped from expression) happens in the first four to six months, as they still heal from birth experiences and early experiences, and for all babies, this is when they are most susceptible to overstimulation. Aletha Solter defines this as when a baby experiences something new that they haven’t experienced before. Think of a baby’s life in the first few months, and pretty much everything is new!
After roughly six months, the amount of crying usually decreases. Awareness is required because by this time, any control patterns will have come in, and so it is important to distinguish between whether the less crying is developmental, i.e. the baby really does have less feelings to express, or whether the less crying is because the baby has developed some control patterns.
We can distinguish this in a few ways… is the baby making plenty of eye contact? Does he express feelings before sleep and on waking, or is something repetitively done to him to bypass the feelings? Does he sleep peacefully and without moving a lot, and generally for more than one sleep cycle? All these are clues that can be taken into account.
As for releasing past hurts and catching up on crying, it really depends on several things:
How many feelings there are in the first place to be expressed,
How long it was before the parents started listening to feelings,
How many of the feelings, and how deep the feelings, the parents are willing to listen to.
Remember that as well as catching up on releasing feelings about his past, your baby will also have daily feelings to release.
I’d love to give you some examples of my own experience. With my daughter, now 11, I started listening to her feelings when she was 3 months old. I generally listened before her sleeps, but mostly in the evening, and she cried generally for half an hour to an hour, and sometimes an hour and a half or longer. At that time I thought that was all her feelings being expressed and caught up on. I hadn’t got to the point of fully distinguishing between a need for food and a need for release, and thus her breast-feeding control pattern stayed strongly until stopping breast-feeding at 2 years. She carried on having a cry before every sleep until she was 3 years old. I wrote down every time she cried and for how long it lasted, for those 3 years.
It wasn’t until my son was born and I listened to his crying, and was very clear right from the beginning that I would distinguish between his need for food and his need to express his feelings, that I realised how many of my daughter’s feelings I had been unwilling to hear, and how much I had interpreted as hunger. I think it took her those three years to catch up on that first three months, and also on the many times that she was needing to cry and I unwittingly fed her. I still see in her now the vestiges of what I did with breast-feeding her as a control pattern.
I want to add that past a year, babies can hold in feelings, not as a control pattern, but as a developmental stage, for a few days… In other words, the first few months are the most intense regarding crying, and as time goes on, most babies need to release less and less, unless there is a new developmental leap, or a new stress, such as the birth of a sibling, going on holiday, moving home, stress in the home, a birthday party, and so on!
The first few months of Aware Parenting are the most intense, but as so many parents share, the bonding that is created through listening to our baby’s feelings is incredible. Listening to our baby’s feelings means that as they become a toddler, they have few accumulated feelings, and the challenges that many other parents face are generally absent. A child who has had his feelings listened to as a baby is generally cooperative, can concentrate for long periods, loves to learn, is eager to explore, and is generally happy. He will still have feelings to express and there will be times of challenge, but listening to the early feelings makes parenting a very different experience.