Cry baby cry

"I would pick her up, feed her, put her in the sling, hold her, rock her, you name it. It made it easier, but it didn't always stop her crying." Katherine Cagney, an area professional liaison officer with La Leche League - the breastfeeding information and support organisation - had breezed through twins and a third baby, when along came her fourth, a little girl she describes as "a very high-need baby".

"By then I had been a trained leader with La Leche League for a few years, I had three babies under my belt, and I felt pretty smug. But Olivia was a whole new challenge. For a long time she only slept for an hour-and-a-half a day. At night she woke up and instead of rooting for the breast, she screamed. During the day she cried and cried and I was exhausted.

"I felt desperate at times - I wanted to leave her screaming and hide in another room where I wouldn't hear her, stick a dummy in her mouth, anything. But deep down I didn't want to give up. I knew in my heart if I left her I would break a bond and the trust between us. "It was very hard, but I carried her all the time, kept her in her sling, in my arms, whatever I could do to give her some comfort. Now she's a bright, happy, sensitive fiveyear-old and we have a very close relationship."

Many people reading Katherine's account of how she coped with a "fussy" baby would write her off as totally out to lunch. Any amount of parenting literature encourages parents to check the obvious things are in order - is she hungry, wet, too hot, too cold, under-stimulated? - and leave her be. Babies are expected to learn to control their emotions. Giving them the sort of attention Katherine gave Olivia would be regarded as "rewarding" the baby for crying - a recipe for disaster.

In fact, there is now a whole body of research indicating that in societies where babies are always in someone's arms, crying is not an issue.

"Crying is a baby's only form of communication," says Kay Carmichael, author of For Crying Out Loud, a book on the importance of crying and the consequences of having to repress tears. "Babies cry to let us know they need something. "In our society we have a tendency to see babies as potentially devouring creatures who will have their way with us if we don't exert some control over them. They frighten us with their instinctual nature. Indeed, since the advent of original sin, we are inclined to think of them as bad and in need of discipline. "As recently as the psychotherapist Anna Freud, their behaviour was classified as unreasonable. But with babies we have to suspend our normal judgment and go with it."

THIS CAN BE a painfully difficult undertaking for parents, Carmichael acknowledges. It would seem easier to leave the baby alone to cry it out or give him a soother. "Their crying makes us feel anxious and guilty. If parents can't pacify their baby, they begin to feel like failures and worry about irritating the neighbours. But babies pick up this tension and cry even more. "It is important for parents to realise they are not the source of the tears, and if possible to talk to anyone who might be disturbed by the crying. They may actually offer to help out."

Parents are often quite bewildered by a baby's distress, at a loss for an explanation once they have done everything they can think of to offer comfort. `A lot of research has been done into this, and all we have found is that sometimes we just don't know why the baby is crying," Carmichael says. "It seems to be a multifactoral problem. The world is generally a more stressful place, and babies feel their parents' stress and cry. We do know that there are more problems as babies have become separated from their mothers - close physical contact is extremely important to them. "We take great pride in `independence' in our society. We place tremendous value on our own independence and actively encourage independence among children. But all relationships have some degree of dependency, and babies in particular are utterly dependent on us. We have to learn to allow babies to be babies, and if parents have the support they need to meet their babies' needs, the high level of dependency will gradually ease."

Katherine had a lot of support from her husband; with his help she tried to do some sort of relaxation everyday. "It's very hard to relax when you're tired, but I did my best. When I could I would go out for a walk on my own in the evening. "I also had three other children to think of and finding time for everyone was hard. There were days when we would come back from school with Olivia screaming all the way. I explained she would grow out of it, and they were amazingly understanding. We figured out ways to keep everyone as happy as we could.

"At times I found it unbearable. I'm not a martyr - I wouldn't be one to sit at home all day on my own nursing a baby like Our Lady of the Sorrows. You have to know your limitations and ask people for help. I used to have other mothers in all the time for a cup of tea and a chat."

"Coping with a newborn baby's needs can seem like an overwhelming responsiblity," says Carmichael.

`It seems like it is never going to end. But a crying baby is nothing to be ashamed of, nor something to keep secret. "It is a baby's only means of communication, and parents should be given all the support they need to give their babies comfort."