If your newborn’s crying leaves you wondering what’s wrong, just give it time. Deciphering a baby’s cry depends entirely on experience, new research suggests.
Being able to tell if your baby is in pain is vital information for new parents and caregivers. But rather than being an innate skill that adults can rely on, understanding the difference between cries of pain and mild discomfort comes with experience.
“We found that adults can recognize signals of pain, as opposed to mild discomfort, in a baby’s cry, but this ability requires prior experience,” said study lead author Siloe Corwin.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that parents of young children are much better at decoding babies’ cries than adults with little or no experience caring for children.
Although this may not seem surprising, the researchers also found that current parents could distinguish the cries of pain and discomfort of babies that they had never heard before. The researchers reported that inexperienced people couldn’t do it.
Over 200 participants with varying levels of parenting experience were given eight recordings of babies crying, which they listened to over the course of two days. They then had to distinguish between vaccination-induced cries of pain and cries of discomfort recorded during a bath.
How well they performed depended largely on the babies’ previous and current exposure. While inexperienced adults did no better than chance, parents and pediatric caregivers who interacted frequently with infants got it right 70 percent of the time.
The study is part of a wider research program studying how information is encoded and transmitted in babies’ cries.
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“Babies need to express their pain or discomfort through crying and vocalization,” Corwin said. “There are other ways to tell if a baby is in pain, such as by facial expressions or posture, but crying can give us additional information about how the baby is feeling.”
The ability to decipher babies’ cries is likely to develop from the neurobiological changes that come with parenting and caring for babies, the authors say.
“The ability to differentiate between pain and discomfort comes quickly; it starts in the first few hours of a baby’s life,” Corwin said. “By the time a baby is two or three months old, most parents know what the different cries mean.”
But you don’t have to be a parent to learn how to decode a baby’s cry, Corwin said, adding, “Any exposure to babies—pediatric care, babysitting, and even listening to recordings—can help tune your ear to the different acoustics patterns of their cries.
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