Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

If you have a crying baby, check the diaper and check if they are hungry. Then calm yourself. You want your heartbeat and breathing to be slow, steady, calming and reassuring while you hold them and walk the floor with them.

Have a routine. Always hold them the same way so it becomes part of the signal. Etc.

Never spend more than 15 minutes trying to get them to sleep. If they won't go to sleep in that time, go play with them. They probably aren't mentally tired yet.

Try again to feed them, check the diaper, see if they are too warm, too cold, etc. Then try again to get them to sleep.

If it's a chronic issue, start a journal and see if you can find a pattern. They may be allergic to a particular juice they are getting. They may need a different formula because the one they are on is causing tummy aches. Etc.

View on HN

When breast feeding, maternal diet can strongly influence digestive distress. Mom eats the wrong thing, and the baby becomes unhappy. Years back, a friend was very disciplined about starting small, incrementally expanding her diet, and using backtracking and search to fix regressions. Now amidst the flood of new parent mail, was a brochure of easy recipes for new moms. She was bemused that she couldn't use a single recipe in it, as they all had ingredients she'd recorded as distressing her infant. The brochure was from Nestle. (EDIT: maker of baby formula, variously amoral)

Thank you.

That was one of the biggest epiphanies for me as a new parent. It had never occurred to me that what I ate would impact the baby that way.

I had physics and chemistry and advanced math in high school, but was completely shocked as a new parent in my early twenties to learn that I would bleed for up to six weeks post partum and a zillion other things.

I still think better parenting info is desperately needed in this world. It's shocking what we don't cover that has such tremendous long term impact on human life.

> high school [...] shocking what we don't cover

Financial planning is suggested as another one.

But even with subjects "covered"... Chemistry education research describes pre-college chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent". First-tier med school grad students with no idea how big cells are. First-tier astronomy grad students getting the color of the Sun wrong. I don't think we fully appreciate quite how pervasively we're doing poorly. Or the magnitude of potential improvement we're neglecting to pursue.

But AR is coming, providing yet another opportunity for disruption. Modulo patents. :/

> First-tier med school grad students with no idea how big cells are. First-tier astronomy grad students getting the color of the Sun wrong.

Is this an actual thing?

Regrettably. My med student samples were tiny, and a decade ago, but the best any of them managed for "how big is a (human) red blood cell?", with quite a bit of struggling (to for instance, remember the scale bar on some histology slides), was "really really small". Some, even when given the answer (in micrometers), didn't believe it. :/ I've continued to play the Sun color game with Harvard Center for Astrophysics students over the years. "A five-year old comes up to you and says, "I'm told the Sun is a big hot ball! Yay! What color is the ball? I really care about the color of balls - I'm five." What color is the Sun?" Adding "viewed from outside the atmosphere" as needed. And rejecting answers like "6500K" with "Five-year old!". Now CfA, in addition to being a first-tier astronomy research center, is also a leader in astronomy education research. And of the few students who get it right, about half (but small N) learned it in a seminar on common misconceptions in astronomy education, rather than from their own atypically successful and extensive education in astronomy. A sometimes follow-up question of "what color is sunlight?" often triggers something like an "oh, wait, that doesn't make sense, does it". Suggesting two bits of incompatible knowledge, bumping together for the first time.

These examples were selected for drama. But the failure modes they illustrate seem widespread. A failure to develop a sense of scale, and a rough quantitative feel for reasonable values in one's field. And a failure to integrate knowledge, with misconceptions persisting far beyond introductory courses. The software one-liner is "if it isn't tested, it doesn't work". And current testing... has poor coverage over the set of skills one might hope for all students. On the one hand, these failures have been remarked upon for decades. On the other hand, as concept inventories spread across fields, a common pattern is "I'm sorry to waste your time taking something so basic as this new concept inventory" followed by "oh bleep, I had no idea". Which is perhaps a metaphor for the bigger picture. It seems we sort of know it's a disaster, but that hasn't quite sunk in yet. Or something. The instructor of a bio lab course saying the thing they most wish their incoming students had, was a firmer grasp of central dogma... and this in a second (or third?) year course, mostly bio and pre-med majors, at a first-tier department and university. When they've likely seen it, repeatedly, since primary school. And yet how many pre-college biology educators view themselves being profoundly unsuccessful?

I was in "advanced" classes and gifted programs starting in second grade. An incident that stands out from high school:

In my AP English class of all the smarty pants kids with all the advantages, I was the only one who knew what husbandry was. Everyone else thought it was about being married.

As an adult, on an email list full of people who attended Ivy league schools and the like, everyone was all up in arms about prejudice against homeschooling. There was an article about a court case where a judge blamed the stupid behavior of a young defendant on "home training" or "home schooling."

The defendant had not been homeschooled, but the people discussing the case were talking about the judge being wildly prejudiced against homeschooling. I had to point out that the judge was basically saying "Oh my God, son, you were just not raised right and you have zero so-called common sense." It had nothing to do with prejudice against homeschoolers.

An extra thought: I once saw someone doing (NSF?) road-tour community outreach for Next Generation Science Standards. She got a lot of questions that were emotional, hostile, rambling, and jaw-droppingly confused. Questions for which I couldn't imagine a constructive response.

I was profoundly impressed by the grace, respect, insight, and "achieving a meeting-of-the-minds response" that she repeatedly achieved. I'd not have thought it possible before seeing it. I wish I had noted her name, or had video.

It's still not something I can do, or even quite imagine how to do. But it changed how I feel when encountering people being aggressively confused. More "I wish I had more of her skill set", less "this seems simply hopeless".

A lot of thought does seem to happen by associational pattern matching.

And it can be startling how rapidly understanding can become gappy and ramshackle, as you move away from someone's narrow research focus or center of exceptional expertise. There's a recurring news meme, look at the <supposedly smart people> (eg, Harvard Business School students) not knowing the <basic thing> (eg, what causes seasons). But if the last time someone saw a topic was in middle school, why would a middle schooler's understanding of the topic come as a surprise? The "You're a Doctor? Yes, of medieval French literature. Great, I have a question for you. I have this nagging pain in my..." misunderstanding of expertise and competence.

The Ten Thousand[1] idea seems yet another significant contribution to society by xkcd. :) [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Pictures of the sun: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/

I years ago saw a NASA sponsored(?) traveling museum exhibit on the Sun. Full of amazingly colorful photos. There wasn't a single true-color photo of the Sun in the entire room. Not a one.

Imaging seeing an museum exhibit on elephants. Full of amazingly colorful elephants. Thermal IR elephants with glowing red ears and cold blue mud. UV elephants. Narrrow-band elephants, colored by the band color, or by something arbitrary. Synthetic elephants with psychedelic maps of skin microbiome. And so on. And not a single photo of a gray elephant in the room. Not a one.

How odd would that be?

Imagine that a live elephant was readily visible through the window.

Most of us have a chance to see the Sun hundreds of times a year. It just takes some conscious though to determine the color of it, compensate for the.effects of the atmosphere, etc. Sun from space should look more blue than from surface, even at a tropical noon.

> Some, even when given the answer (in micrometers), didn't believe it. :/

Why not? Did they thing the actual answer was smaller or larger?

> And of the few students who get it right, about half (but small N) learned it in a seminar on common misconceptions in astronomy education, rather than from their own atypically successful and extensive education in astronomy.

Is the answer not yellowish-white?

No. The atmosphere gives the yellowish tinge by scattering blue. The sun looks white from outside it, emitting strongly all the colors we can see. The strongest emissions are near green.

See this is not "no", this is "yes, but I didn't mean the perceived colour by humans".

The question then is "when you said colour what did you mean?". If you want the colour as viewed by a person, but from space without Earth's atmosphere, then that's a very specific request.

If someone says "yellow", you should ask, "why?" (as I did to one of my kids very recently). If they mention Rayleigh scattering then I'd say they answered an ill-defined question quite well.

If you think about it "the sun is white" is one of those weird physicisty things we do when we mean in an idealised situation that's not normally true. Like saying water is a liquid at RTP and not accounting for evaporation.

TL;DR "the sun is white" is incorrect perceptually. Physically -- not bound by human perception -- it's not just white as there is infrared and x-ray radiation too.

Ouch, my bad. There are differing views on misconceptions. Some view them as no big deal: create 'em now, maybe clean them up later. Incremental lying and clarification. Another is that they're more problematic: hard to undo, creating thought "friction" that discourages knowledge integration and application, and more.

My own atypical view, is that they are extremely toxic mutagenic agents of corrupting cognitive death. ;) In part because the corruption spreads. Have one bogus bit of story, try to reconcile it with valid bits, and soon one has a creative flurry of additional bogus stories attempting to patch them together. Recurse.

I once saw an introduction to the solar system page, with a big graphic at the top. It was a work of art. It reinforced so many common misconceptions about the solar system. My thought then was, there's no way the rest of this page can dig out from the hole of damage done by this first graphic. Net-negative learning. In general, it seems so very easy for content to cause severe collateral damage.

I use a remark like "from space" or "outside the atmosphere", to prune a conversation space. But it does reinforce the idea, to the best of my knowledge incorrect, that seen from the surface, the Sun is not often white. Sorry. I'll have to think about how to mitigate that. Thanks.

> Incremental lying and clarification. //

This was the method used to teach me in school. Maybe it worked well but I recall at two stages having conversations like (me) "that's not true" and (teacher) "this is how we have to learn it for now".

Perhaps it would sit better with me if it was explicitly acknowledged that the model was flawed. "We're going to learn about how a ball flies, and bounces; but that's a surprisingly complex thing to make a physics picture of. So, we'll be simplifying it a lot just so we can kick-start our understanding by focussing on some basic concepts that are mathematically easier to model."

If you go down this line of questioning, then there's another reason "white" probably doesn't fit as an answer. The sun doesn't emit "white photons", we simply perceive the combination of photons of the visible light spectrums as white.

Hmm, I'd like to follow up more on the education aspect than on the Sun bit...

Imagine a conversation with a five-year old. "What are you doing? Making this Arduino blink an LED light. What color is the light?"... Now imagine responding to that five-year old with a discourse on spectra and photons.

Yes, the misconceptions in such discourse can be fun and amazing. A recurring response from non-astronomy physical-sciences graduate students is something like "The Sun doesn't have a color; it's lots of different colors; it's rainbow colored". But maybe I've long missed the interesting question.

Why is stuff like this even a candidate to be said? Does the Sun seem so alien or aphysical that normal experience of objects doesn't apply? Are concepts of color fragilely situational? ("Bananas are yellow, but wow, mangoes? Do mangoes even have a color? Photons mumble spectra mumble."?) Are answers just associational mind dumps? (Before the "five-year old" was emphasized, a recurring response was a brain dump of random ideas about color and about the Sun, followed by "Did I get it right?".) Just what is going on here?

There's seems an opportunity to think less superficially about this than I have done. Yay. Thanks!

Oh yes absolutely, and it's not the current sun, it's the 8 minutes ago sun, and the photons may have spent a lot longer getting to you maybe 10-100 thousands years bouncing around in the sun before it escapes, shoots through Space, maybe bounces again and ends it's journey flexing a molecule in your eye.

It's mind blowing to me.

> It's mind blowing

:) When people watch this[1], and I'm standing next to them, they'll often ask about the ripples. But if they were watching it alone, there isn't an easy way to do that.

Someone did an art project, where you sit and watch an interesting drama video. But why was it interesting? There's an eye tracker, and the video is a graph of scenes, like an old "choose your own adventure" story. So if you're interested in character A... the video explores/emphasizes character A.

AR/VR is coming. With eye tracking (eventually... patents). So...

Imagine science education that's consistently mind blowing, rather than boring. What might that be like?

Though a cautionary note: there's apparently a problem of students, who have consistently had excellent teachers, clearly and motivationally presenting material, reaching college without the skills or inclination to themselves wrestle with a body of knowledge and distill understanding. Another opportunity for improvement. :)

[1] stop-motion animation with individual molecules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0

> emitting strongly all the colors we can see. The strongest emissions are near green

Wouldn’t that make it yellowish or greenish white?

Incoming light spectra are convolved with the frequency responses of the eye's photoreceptor cells (basically R, B, and G for color). The Sun, and your computer screen, achieve white using quite different spectra. They just have to poke the cells to similar extents. Forgetting that the eye matters is common. "Spectra peak in green, so Sun is green" is one (not so common) resulting misconception.

Years ago I saw paper go by, a NATO long-term "sky survey" - a color-calibrated camera watching the full hemisphere of the daytime sky somewhere in Spain(?) for year or so. As I recall it, the chromaticity of the Sun, when more than a couple of tens of degrees above the horizon, regardless of cloud cover, was nothing but white.

> Why not? Did they thing the actual answer was smaller or larger?

Good question - I don't know. I didn't pursue it, but where it was obvious, smaller. Thinking back now, years later, my impression of one student, is that of a feeling of great smallness, contrasted with a concrete length, maybe yielding a "no, that doesn't feel small enough".

> Is the answer not yellowish-white?

What color is sunlight? ;)

The answer is white. Sunlight when viewed outside our atmosphere is the definition of white.

> First-tier med school grad students with no idea how big cells are. First-tier astronomy grad students getting the color of the Sun wrong

I fail to get outraged about this. Surely the important skill is knowing when you don't know, recognising when you need to know, and knowing where to look up the relevant facts.

(Disclaimer - these aren't my subjects though I do have a fair bit of physics)

> Surely the important skill is knowing when you don't know, recognising when you need to know

The astronomy students who get it wrong are generally initially quite confident. At least some of the med students both knew they didn't know, and rejected the correct size. So we're not doing great even on such recognition.

> how big cells are

Attempting to teach a sense of scale is part of most every undergraduate science and engineering program. So some first-tier medical school students lacking in such, at least raises the question of how well that teaching is working, even among more successful students.

> knowing where to look up the relevant facts

Beyond recall of individual facts, is integrating them into understanding. One challenge when teaching stoichiometry, is apparently students not thinking of atoms as real physical objects. It's not that they are missing a fact, that atoms don't locally pop in and out of existence in large numbers, but that they've failed to make a connection, that after some chemistry happens, those atoms must still be around.

Having a misconception about the color of the Sun might lose you a game of trivial pursuit. But it will also interfere with your understanding of say blackbodies and color. And by hindering integration, make it less likely that you'll catch your misconceptions with those too. Recurse.

Lacking a sense of scale, means missing a powerful framework for integrating physical phenomena, and not having a feel for reasonable numbers, and thus struggling with rough quantitative reasoning.

> outraged

Ok... but awareness of the magnitude of current problems, and of available opportunities for improvement, is nice to have, no?

What we should cover is the legal system. It's weird that kids don't study what is and is not legal at all.

It is sort of old school common knowledge from where I am that nursing mother's meal choices impacts digestion of baby. Interesting to note what is obvious in one culture/place could be totally novel thing in another.

Highly immoral - they still advertise formula as preferable to breast feeding in many parts of the world. I wouldn't trust any advice from them.

Have been avoiding all Nestle group products for over 20 years.

Formula can be preferable to breastfeeding. The benefits of breastmilk are real, but typically overstated. If you have the time, the energy (and the milk-production!) then, sure, you should breastfeed. But if the decision isn't right for you, you shouldn't feel bad about giving your babies formula. The most important thing is making sure the baby is fed.

Obviously, the Nestle story is disgusting, but that doesn't mean a mom can't supplement with a little formula while she waits for her milk to come in, or in order to avoid pumping in the bathroom at work, or to let dad take over a feeding or two so she can sleep. The messaging given to new moms makes it sound like milk is magic health juice and formula is one step above rat poison, but this isn't the case.

The most important thing is making sure the baby is fed.

20 million times this.

I had one child who breastfed more than a year. He has health issues and that did him a lot of good.

My other child breastfed full-time only ten days, then once a day until he was six weeks old for the immune support it provides. He is lactose intolerant and every few weeks I temporarily put him on a bean based formula, IIRC, to clear up his diarrhea.

Doctors were zero help with this issue. I just figured out what worked on my own and only later realized he was lactose intolerant.

My sister successfully breastfed in part because of my pragmatic "do what works for the baby and ignore everything else" approach.

I successfully resolved my own issue with a blocked milk duct because of a passage in a Heinlein book. Showing the nurse my nipple and explaining how painful it was accomplished absolutely nothing while making me feel humiliated.

Huh, I never knew you could be lactose intolerant to your mother's milk.

My sister was lactose intolerant but that only manifested when my mom tried switching to formula at 10 months. My sister was gasy, had diarrhea, spent the whole night crying but seemed fine during the day. Doctor just told my mom she needs some time to adapt. After weeks of sleepless nights, just holding my crying sister all night, she went to a different doctor. She was an elderly woman, old school, and immediately diagnosed her properly. At that point my sister has lost quite some weight and all the milk messed up her intestinal villi, so even after my mom switched to soy milk my sister couldn't really digest anything for another week or two, so basically lost some more weight and kept crying. One of the worst episodes of raising kids she says.

Sure. If you are unable, or supplementing that's one thing, I think few would take issue with that, nor should they. There's lots of valid reasons as you mention, and some get no choice but to use formulas. I'm not sure the benefits are that overstated - least not from my somewhat hazy memory of what came with the UK new mum packs and NHS info.

As for Nestle? Repeated reports of breaking agreements, in developing countries where breast feeding and income is low and water untreated. I would say that's quite another thing. Boycott started in the 60s or 70s, and Nestle still haven't figured out how to act ethically in the poorer parts of the globe.

I see little reason to want to give them money yet - despite depriving myself of Kit Kats. :)

Is there any chance you could share your friend’s list? I’m expecting a baby soon and this sounds like it would be very useful...

Congratulations. There’s a lot to think about when your newborn comes along and to be honest, I think you should concentrate on eating things to keep you happy and healthy and only worry about what’s being being passed through your breast milk if there’s a particular problem.

Pragmatic advice from the NHS

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/breastfeedi...

Advice on what you should be eating now:

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/vitamins-mi...

A few I know:

Onions or anything spicy.

Surprisingly, peanut butter and other peanut products. This was an issue with my first baby.

Anything that is a common food allergy, such as nuts.

It will be specific to the child, though. There won't be some one-size-fits-all universal list.

I've heard that it's important to eat a diverse natural diet in order to avoid allergy development. I've heard (from different sources) that both avoiding and excessive intake of peanuts leads to peanut allergy development.

Your last sentence gets my full 'random internet dude' endorsement though!

Au contraire, you should be eating a modest dose of nuts to avoid the development of peanut allergy: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/eating-nuts-in-pre...

I have a genetic disorder that wasn't diagnosed until my kids were 11 and 13. The child in question has the same genetic disorder that wasn't diagnosed until a few weeks after I was diagnosed because they tested both my kids after I was diagnosed.

He and I both have found we continue to need to limit our consumption of peanuts because they are pro-inflammatory, having nothing whatsoever to do with allergy per se.

One size does not fit all.

Congratulations! In addition to other advice here, please find a scientifically minded and up to date pediatrician who can recommend good reading material to you. Unfortunately, it's hard to vet for this when you are not a medical professional, but read reputable materials about pregnancy and early childhood (research the authors) and try your best to learn as much as you can, while also searching carefully for a public track record, awards, etc. each candidate pediatrician might have.

When you have one you are happy with, discuss this topic and anything else you are curious about with him/her and the nurses. Don't be shy and ask as many questions as you can, they are there to help you. Please beware of anecdotes and forums. Best of luck!

> list [...] sounds like it would be very useful...

I think it's more dynamic and adaptive than that. That two people, at some specific time, seemed to have a pattern of causes of (un)happiness, would likely be of only limited use elsewhere.

Googling turns up innumerable recommended/avoid food lists... with some overlap. :)

But the main lesson I drew, was the applicability of wisdom from ops, experimentation, system design, debugging, and so on.

Patterns exist which are usefully noticed. Even though many are short-lived, and are mixed with noise. Expect them to change.

Keep logs/notes. Including about yourself. Because it's hard to keep track of things, let alone see patterns, and notice them changing, when you're distracted and exhausted.

Witness a "you know, it seems like maybe, the team might be tired and unproductive on the day after we go drinking all evening?" :)

It helps if you can find "a place to stand", something that works, at least for now, that you can build out from, while keeping things working, and backing off when things stop working. One new food at a time.

When things are broken, it's nice to have some simpler setup(s) you can fall back to. Small easy simple minimalist. Someplace familiar to stand and debug from. A set of "these are easy and have never seemed a problem" foods.

A-B testing; falling back to "more likely to be good" state; divide and conquer search; the idea that you gradually introduce changes and see how they go; ... all are useful.

KISS.

No doubt a lot of professions feel their training was great preparation for supporting a child. It sure seems that way for engineering. (There is a book series to write, if it doesn't already exist... "The <profession> guide to <age> children".)

Good luck. I saw a story once, about a mom who captured a picture of their child every day before he left for school, because she was convinced she would never see him again... the person who came back later, was always someone a bit different - familiar, but not someone she'd met yet. So a random silly bit of old-guy advice: savor the dance, for it can't be captured, is a sacrilege to retard, and escapes irretrievably beyond reach every day.

I recall one particularly difficult evening/night after I decided it was a good idea to cook a delicious, chili heavy thai dish for my wife.

The potential for false positives here seems astronomical...

Checking a diaper and figuring out if they are hungry is a good first step (and I would add burping the baby a bit, and making sure their nose isn’t stuffed up), but the rest of this advice is a bit misdirected in my opinion, and ignores the most effective actionable things parents can do to shush a crying baby.

Namely, what pediatrician Harvey Karp calls the “5 S’s” of (1) swaddling the baby, (2) holding the baby on their side/stomach, (3) loudly shushing in the baby’s ear, (4) swinging the baby back and forth, (5) giving the baby something to suck on.

Go find Dr. Karp’s “happiest baby” video or other videos of people performing these steps, as text posts don’t really convey the idea fully.

These techniques are extremely effective on the vast majority of babies (usually just shushing and swinging is enough for my current newborn), but many new parents don’t know about them or do them improperly. In particular, shushing needs to be a very loud constant white noise, and the rocking/jiggling/swinging of the baby should be a bit more vigorous than new parents might naturally do.

I don’t like the wording of 4. Don’t swing the baby. Rock the baby gently. The movement is often a distraction and soothing them. Swinging almost sounds like you’re shaking them. (I know we are referring to the same thing just don’t like the word swing)

When my Daughter was born I was the one who dealt with her at night time for 4 weeks after our confinement nanny left. To get her to sleep I would swaddle her, hold her on her side in my arms and rock her gently while saying “shushhhhhhhhh in her ear till she calmed down” she would fall asleep in about 2 minutes. Then I would place her in the cot slowly and pat her bum for 5 minutes. Then she would sleep for 3-4 hours till next feed.

I had never heard of the 5 S’s but the similar things I did they do work.

You are more or less “shaking” them, or maybe “firmly jiggling” would be a better description. It’s not like the shaking you would use for a cocktail, but neither the word “swinging” nor the word “rocking” really describes the motion you want either. If the baby is really crying hard, you don’t want your motion to be too “gentle”; you want to match the intensity of their crying with your motion and shushing.

Try to find a video demonstrating; it’s quite hard to convey the appropriate amount of vigor with text.

It's easy to accidentally shaky a baby too hard if you juggle it, especially when you are tired or frustrated so generally it's a safer bet to hold the baby pressed to your body, so any swinging the baby does is swinging your body is doing too (swiveling and bouncing), protecting your baby from shaking.

Note, I would recommend against juggling a baby. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling

Also adults should never take out their own frustration/anger on a baby. That’s not what we are talking about here.

It’s not that easy to accidentally shake a baby too hard. Babies are quite robust, and new parents (that I have seen anyway) are almost all extremely cautious. But make sure the baby is fully supported; you don’t want their head flopping around.

Go watch the nurses/midwives/doctors in a maternity ward sometime and you will see them manhandling newborns in ways that make new parents nearby feel pretty anxious... but the babies are just fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB2Fw3MFlhk (The original Happiest Baby video has a bunch more examples with live crying babies and makes it a bit clearer. I don’t know if those are online anywhere though.)

I copied my wife’s motions when we had our first. She worked in child care for a while, and (when standing) does this sort of 2-phase motion: sway back and forth at about 1 Hz plus a up/down light bounce at about 3 Hz. Works well in my experience.

We had a fussy baby and somehow I got hold of this book. "Well that won't work", I thought. But sure enough, she started crying, I put her on her stomach on my underarm (like a football), swaddled and shushed, and it worked like a charm! And indeed, I had to swing her a bit harder than you would expect (not to the point where it would feel uncomfortable, of course).

Also: vacuum cleaners make great white noise machines.

In England this hold is sometimes called "tiger in the tree". (First result from DDG which I'm using just for the image) http://dadabouttown.com/the-tiger-in-the-tree-hold/

Never heard that, I'm in UK and know it as "hold them like a rugby ball".

"Rugby hold" is also a breast-feeding position.

But also, just experiment with your kid! Mine did not like loud noises or big movements. That's cool. When it was time for kid to sleep, we left kid to sleep -- and kid went to sleep with no mechanical aid. Kid hates white noise, as do I. It was good to find this out -- saved us all hours of bouncing and rocking and shushing.

A lot of this seems to be suggestive of the womb: shushing (like a heart beat or breathing), fixing the temperature and light, swaddling, rocking...

Yes that is exactly the idea.

"4th trimester" is was Karp calls it.

Nice....

If I was a kid and not a Man I maybe find some use for this one,

But no!

I wish all the babies be well, mine 4 beauties, and all other babies in the world

What you wish for others is what God will give you!

#4, and #5 for sure.

My niece was upset due to just being fed and her stomach having the usual baby issues, a bit of jiggling on my lap with my little finger to suck on calmed her right down as mum was having a bit of a meltdown due to lack of sleep, and baby being super demanding. Niece was asleep in no time due to being handled confidently and noticing what was working and what wasn't.

One size most certainly doesn't fit all.

What would you recommend as number 5?

Some babies like their pacifiers/dummies, some like a clean little finger for #5

Sorry for the late response ... Notifications don't seem to be a thing on this site.

These techniques are so, so effective. The video is probably the best single gift anyone can give to a new parent.

We’re currently renting the SNOO, which is a bassinet that automates some of this stuff for pre-crawling babies. It’s been very effective in helping our youngest sleep through the night at a much earlier age than her older sister. It’s basically a robot night nanny.

1 and 2 worked for me. But bear in mind that these are tricks to avoid or induce newborn reflexes. They will all stop working within a few months as they outgrow instinctive behavior.

Self-promotion[0], but as a physicist dad, I never found the pattern:

> Unfortunately, while physics problems have solutions that are constant, baby-related problems have solutions that are random and change from day to day. What had worked yesterday will not work today. Maybe it will work tomorrow. This is the gist of the Baby Universe.

[0] https://medium.com/@philshem/life-in-the-baby-universe-f5256...

I'm finding this to be the case as well. You're trying to detect complex patterns that can take a good week to suss out and influence, and yet which are changing on approximately that same timeframe. You're continually behind the bus.

And you'll find that the same "thing" will succeed/fail depending on the parent.

The way our child behaves/reacts with me is very different to how he is with his mother. For example when our child won't sleep at nap-time, or in the evening, I put him in a pram and take him for a walk around the block. It's a horrid solution, but it works about 90% of the time.

When my wife has tried this it has never. once. worked.

(He plays differently with the pair of us, and tries different behaviour. It is kinda fascinating to see the difference - part of that is our relative strictness, but part of it is him I think.)

Re the pram not working for your wife, the speed can make the frequency of bumps different. Some people can think "trying to be calm and make no noise" and really that doesn't matter so much for babies IME. So perhaps one of you was too gentle?

My wife always had problems with nap time when they're a bit older 1½-2. But for me it was a process, starting at lunch, moving through story time, then I'd maybe sing or hum snuggled next to them on the bed.

She'd do lunch, then play, then read a story in a really animated way, then try and put them down for a nap and wonder why it wasn't working.

A sling is good, ambulatory frequency, close to heart, they feel your breathing, are warm but heat is regulated by the parents body too.

For walking I'd say we're both average, but who knows it could be a minor difference like that.

As for slings I ruled them out early on - Finnish winters mean that babies, children and parents all need to be pretty warmly wrapped up. That made slings way, way too bulky and impractical.

Also known as "The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior": "Under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damn well pleases."

I had a total stranger joke "You're hired!" when I got her crying baby to sleep (after she failed) while she led a tour of her new custom home that included me in the tour. It was a party my sister took me to.

(shrug)

> Then calm yourself.

Easier said than done when an infant is wailing into your face!

Advice like this is good, and well-intentioned. But I know that when I had babies, the last thing I wanted was advice that made it seem like there was a simple process to make any baby happy and that if I couldn't make it work I must be doing something wrong.

Your diagnostic is pretty good. With mine, the main three things I checked where diaper?, hungry?, tired?, in that order. Eventually, I could usually tell which it was by the sound of the crying. But sometimes babies just cry. That's OK too and doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. Kids are little entropy generators — they will bring chaos into your life and no amount of advice will neutralize all of it.

Easier said than done when an infant is wailing into your face!

Once I saw with my own eyes what a powerful positive effect this had on my baby, it got lots easier to just take a minute to calm myself down as the first step of the process. It only failed in cases where I was breastfeeding and had eaten a thing that was bothering my baby, baby had been fed juice they were allergic to because we were out and about and ran out of formula and I bought what seemed like the least worst thing for them or similar circumstances.

The adult heart is so much larger than the baby's heart that it literally helps set the tempo for the baby, like a drum beat coordinating a group effort.

And I have health problems, I'm anxiety prone, etc etc etc. This was an empowering experience. I don't need to manipulate my baby or sing a lullaby, etc. I just need to be calm myself and, if there aren't hidden problems, this will help baby calm down and go to sleep.

My sister's baby had serious sleep issues. I visited for a month to serve as the nanny. This had such a big positive impact, they rearranged furniture to support the routine I established for the baby. The baby still had sleep issues, but it was a vast improvement over things before the month I spent caring for the infant.

I was just really good with babies in my youth.

Easier said than done when an infant is wailing into your face

Our daughter's crying never bothered me and I could always calm her. Our son's crying shattered my brain and I'd often have to hand him off to his mom.

Haha. My Daughter when born. She didn’t cry to tell us she’s hungry. She cried to tell the entire neighbour she’s hungry. The people who live above us thought our daughter was sick because her crying when hungry was so bad. But the moment the bottle touched her lips instant happy.

I always new what she needed cos she had cues.

- screaming at top of lungs = hungry

- kicking feet violently = nappy change

- waving arms about = tired

That's one of my lines too "sometimes babies just cry".

One thing that helped us from 6 months onwards is sign language. Start at 6 months and by 9-10 months they can start signing back to you; if they can tell you they need the potty (we started that when they started solids), or are hungry, or want mum, or whatever it makes things much easier IMO.

Sometimes, a good pair of earplugs is helpful.

Baby assembly language, instruction set:

    neh = hungry (give food)
    aww = tired (put to sleep)
    eii = unconformable (change diaper)
    aii = gripes (gases, need to burp)

There is apparently research which shows the crying has a different tone depending on the baby's issue and it is indeed hardwired and common across all infants

Plus sometimes if you have checked all of the essentials then let your baby cry for a bit.

I think I did that exactly once to let him know he wasn't actually emperor of the universe (cuz: Reasons). In my extended family, "just let the baby cry" is simply not standard policy.

When one relative was told the baby had colic and "just let the baby cry," the parents changed the baby's formula. The so-called colic went away. The baby stopped crying all the time.

Colic is a symptom, not a disease. It just means the baby is crying a lot and nobody knows why.

Food allergies are one potential cause of colic. So is an immature digestive system (in particular, it takes a little while for the gut to get colonized by the normal flora that aid in digestion). The colic might have resolved because the baby was allergic to the old formula, or because after a while new gut flora finally allowed them to digest things properly, or they grew and gas pains were no longer as big a deal (babies grow really fast!).

The baby was born early. The mom did some research and found a more easily digested formula specifically designed for babies with digestive issues.

(Colic...) just means the baby is crying a lot and nobody knows why.

I would add that it means "and we don't care and we feel like doing nothing for a crying baby is fine once we've labeled it." It's a practice I wish would go die in a fire somewhere because babies labeled as "colicky" are routinely allowed to wail for an hour or more while no one makes any effort whatsoever to comfort them.

I'm glad they were able to sort it out so quickly.

I don't think it's so much that doctors don't care as that most cases spontaneously resolve faster than any person can systematically figure them out.

There's a psychological benefit to the parents -- they're often pretty stressed out and feeling like they're the problem. Putting on a white coat and a serious face while diagnosing the problem as intrinsic to the infant relieves the parents of the burden of thinking they're bad at their new permanent job, and probably helps bolster their waning ability to handle trying to comfort a crying infant without snapping and harming the baby or themselves. I don't think the idea is to leave the baby to wail as much as it is to get the parents to stop taking the wailing personally.

Like most of the paternalistic little white lies doctors deploy, it's not usually the appropriate treatment for patients who know better. Sadly some doctors never learn to distinguish these little psychological tricks (which are an important part of the medical art) from real knowledge about human biology. If they frustrate rather than comfort you, and your doctor can't or won't be straight with you, it's time to find a new one.

Overall, I really like your comments here and generally agree with you about what is going on.

The problem is that it actively fosters a callous and ignorant attitude. It would be much better to tell parents "Sometimes we don't know and won't figure it out because babies are growing and developing so fast that it's a really fast moving target. So sometimes they outgrow the problem before we can confidently identify the cause of the crying."

Telling parents that crying is normal and should simply be accepted breaks an important feedback system. Crying is always an indicator of distress. Sometimes it's mild distress that is readily resolved with a nap, but it is always an indicator of distress. No parent should ever be told otherwise while we try to find ways to help them calm down and so forth.

Parents I knew who accepted the colic explanation in infancy continued to be insensitive and ignorant parents at later stages of development as well. They didn't magically grow more sensitive, attentive to the needs of the child and proactive just because the child got older and learned to talk.

So I think the practice of telling parents it is colic and babies just cry sometimes is generally a bad education practice.

Keeping yourself calm is so huge. We realized with our second kid. We were so nervous with our first and did all the tricks and yelled at each other about doing them wrong or forgetting whatever accessories we needed. Babies sense the tension and amplify it. We were so chill with the second kid and he slept well very quickly without the bag of tricks because we were always calm even when he was screaming.

> Then calm yourself.

> Never spend more than 15 minutes trying to get them to sleep.

This is a great opportunity to do some mindfulness meditation – which can help with the calmness issue. I wish I would have known that when I was raising a newborn.

Also, babies get numb limbs from not being able to move in the bed/crib. Hence why holding them from a bit and changing their position might help.

Unless it’s colic, in which case be prepared to hold your squirming, squealing infant for about 4 hours every evening for several weeks

Good advice.

Although calming myself and slowing my heartbeat is difficult and impractical if I just drank coffee.

Coffee also makes the milk taste bad. Caring for an infant is a stressful and unforgiving task that requires mental stability, so I'd recommend to avoid coffee completely while caring for a baby.

While good advice to a breastfeeding mother you're assuming a few things here: age of baby, that I'm breastfeeding, that I'm the mother. Perhaps the baby does not get breastfed (anymore). Perhaps I'm not the mother.

Sorry if I rubbed you the wrong way. I didn't mean to specifically target any person with what I wrote. I was rather well aware that what I wrote is visible to the public, and I tried to word it to address any reader.

No offense taken. You didn't rub me the wrong way, I just wanted to clarify that part, including for a reader.

> They may be allergic to a particular juice they are getting.

I'll just say it: don't give your baby juice. It's bad for just about everything, and good for basically nothing.

Babies should be breastfed, or given formula, and then gradually introduced to solid foods like oatmeal, mashed bananas/apples as they grow older.

Once they're toddlers and done with breastfeeding/formula, give them water to drink. Anything else is just a net negative.

Agreed. The only times juice is appropriate for a baby is if they are at risk of dehydration (at which point give them anything they’ll drink) or if they’re constipated (the sugar in juice can stimulate the digestive system).

In general juice isn’t particularly healthy for anyone. It’s sugar water.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com