Why babies cry in the first three months, how to tell them apart, and what to do

I’d like to add: it is ok to ask for help.

Exactly.

Babies cry because they're new to the world. They have not yet grown the moderating influence of context provided by experience. Every baby is unique, with a different emotional balance.

A big chunk of parenting is figuring your kids out, and balancing that with the set of experiences they need to have in order to grow. Many of those experiences are painful, which means you also need to figure out the balance of "let them cry" and "comfort them", which also changes drastically over time.

That's where having both parents really matters, as the tension between them is essential in finding that balance.

Yeah babies are different.

My kids didn’t scream or cry much at all.

Friends whose kids screamed all the time were astonished and tried everything to figure it out.

But we had opposite experiences with kids sleeping through a the night, I’m tired just thinking of it.

Here's one that always worked for me from about 6mo to 18mo: If she was crying and I played Hamilton on my phone, she'd immediately stop crying. Then I'd figure out that had been wrong and solve the actual problem for her.

This was a 100% thing, it felt like magic, but of course I'm not gonna dole it out as even remotely likely to work with another baby.

Babies only have a single mechanism of communication and it takes a while to debug it.

Imagine you had a computer that would crash every time something went wrong. You would develop a checklist for that computer to help with debugging it. That’s the exact same thing with kids.

> For example, their techniques that "always work" definitely do not always work.

Among parenting social media influencers, this is a gamble for building rapport among an audience:

Make some extreme claim that may or may not work for some portion of people who hear it. People who hear it, try it, and find that it works will vividly remember the influencer as being correct. People who try it with no results will quickly forget it about it.

Repeat across several claims and eventually some percentage of them will be correct for the audience.

Very true, I was going to make a similar statement but you said it perfectly. Infants do follow some common patterns, but what works for YOUR infant might be completely different that what you’ve read, been told, or even experienced with prior children. I don’t think there is any shame in doing what works as long as it is safe.

My own "technique that always works" (your mileage may vary) was "The hold".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2C8MkY7Co8

In my experience the baby will often resume crying as soon as you stop doing it, but we used this whenever we needed a couple minutes of relief.

My only advice to new parents is to largely ignore other parents' advice. Except mine, and only in this one instance.

Every child is a whole new world, a whole new potential, and a whole new problem.

1. My first child couldn't be calmed easily, although I found a song that somehow worked. [0]

2. Second child could be soothed by slowly rubbing from his temple down past his eye to his cheek.

3. Third child hated that, but loved having her forehead rubbed slowly in a horizontal manner.

4. Fourth child just wanted a firm pressure on the top of his head (e.g., a palm, he'd also burrow up into your armpit for comfort sometimes, which was awkward when I hadn't showered that day)

5. Fifth child didn't need any of the above, just lots of hugs and kisses at bed time. Bless her.

The only generally applicable rules I found are:

* Sleeping on your chest when young where they can hear your heartbeart (I found it works best with Dad when breastfeeding, as the smell of Mom's milk tended to stir them up for a feed, even if they're struggling with wind and not able to feed) can be very calming. Ideally done skin to skin.

* Slow rocking while making a continuous "sssshhh" noise often helped - the fact I'd become a human white noise generator amused me.

* Patiently, calmly, love them. It's most important to do this when it's hardest to love them. Knowing that they can be total assholes and you'll still love them is what grows secure kids.

* Ask for help when you're struggling! A lot of your friends and family are probably desperate to help you, but they don't want to appear condescending, or to intrude. So give them permission, explicitly invite them to help, and your sanity will return, which will make you a much better parent for baby.

That's it. That's all my parenting advice after five babies.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCpXp6o8dnk

My daughter had 3 different cries that I learned when I was left alone with her for 1 week when she was 3 weeks old.

Hungry. Wet. Tired. When I learned these she was easy to take care of.

The night terrors tho. That phase is soooo hard. 3 weeks walking up in the middle of the night screaming for no reason. Hours to get her back to sleep. Then just stops…

I always figured a baby could just have a headache or other painful/uncomfortable issues that show no symptoms and you've just got to accept that you can't always determine what they need to stop crying. I think it helps me have more sympathy and patience for them when I look at it that way.

> The […] world is chock full of people who found something that worked for them and who then made the unwarranted conclusion that it is universal truth.

FTFY. Oh wait…

You're absolutely right. Nevertheless it helps to have a finite list of priorities: If it's not cold,heat,hunger, discomfort,illness,tiredness (in no particular order) it's good to know that you didn't forget anything important and your baby is crying for no reason you are responsible for.

Btw. What the author calls "wicked hour" we used to call "brain pain" - like aching muscles after training, just with the developing brain. One kid wouldn't calm down after being held very tightly for minutes in a dark room and having a screaming tantrum. Once this was over, she was absolutely peaceful again. Other kid didn't need to scream to cope with the day, but had difficulties at the same time of day.

>IMO this is a great time of one's life to discard the illusion of control.

Became a first-time parent back in 2020, and couldn't agree more. The trend of slowly increasing personal freedom/control suddenly stops, and your freedom is reverted back to near-zero. As in, you will become completely dependent on your spouse and cannot even piss or shit alone when bubs is awake.

The best thing to do is just acknowledge that this is life now (and more than that, the type of life that human beings have evolved to live in), and the past few years of unrestrained personal freedom were a dream that you needed to wake up from.

Especially since the author has twins, and it's really easy to think you have two independent samples when you really have two very similar ones (in both genetics and shared environment)

If being a parent taught me anything, it's to trust my instincts - go with your gut, as the parent(s) you understand your baby better than any other parents, friends or healthcare workers.

It's a long story, but we could have saved our family a lot of grief if we knew that from the start - but of course, as first time parents it's not easy to trust your guy.

Or just earn a ton of money and outsource much of it to professional nannies?

For most of history having children wasn't much of a choice. It just happened and you dealt with it. Now we have the opportunity to think about it and choose.

Having kids almost never makes sense though. You are never "ready". If you think about it much, you're much less likely to choose to do it.

Your opinion may shift naturally. I’ve started noticing as I get older that, despite my career, social life, finances etc being better than some close friends with kids - they are much happier. Even the people who’ve struggled financially because of it. The joy of a child, the constant challenge of raising it, and the constant change as it grows, seem to provide much more happiness than I can get from doing the “new cool thing” in the city or travelling or anything else. It also depends how early you are in your career but most people end up doing relatively meaningless work and having a kid will provide incredible meaning to your life comparatively. Finally, if you choose not to have kids your limiting your pool of potential partners and for most people being single forever is lonely.

This doesn’t apply to everyone. There are exceptions. And maybe I’m wrong and my opinion will shift again as I age further but I think as you see peers have children and the meaning it brings to their lives your opinion will change.

(Context: Am dad. Love kids. Find parenting super tough. No regrets.)

How's this for a rule of thumb: if you can be happy without having kids, don't have kids. They're very hard work, expensive, and often bad for your mental health. But, if like a lot of people you know you will always be sad if you don't have kids, have as few as you need to scratch the itch.

As I sit here watching my 2 year old try and figure out what the hell a helium balloon is and why does it float when everything else falls, it is quite fun and enjoyable. They surprise you and they give a lot of affection and love back.

It is true that you will miss out on "me time" for several years, but that changes eventually. It is not hard work, just relentless at times.

For me, I don't think I would ever have been "ready" until it would be too late. The longer you leave things, the less time you have to sort it out. People assume that fertility issues only happen to other people, but there is a surprisingly high number - something like 25% of couples face issues conceiving one way or another. If you don't even start until late 30s or early 40s, you are at the tail-end of fertility (especially for females as there is a finite number of eggs). Sure there is IVF etc but it is not an emotionally simple process.

> I think it'd resent it taking me away from spending time on the topics that legitimately interest me

oh, this one is kinda easy to prepare for: just forget about having time for this at all in the first couple of months. First 3 months you're not doing anything but caring for the baby, deal with that. Well, ok, you may have time to watch youtube or other videos while feeding or so.

Around 1 year old, the kid can become real fun though.

Don't forget that children are a natural investment, you raise a big family and it will take care of you in the long run

You may think of it as a cognitive CPU cycle now, but when you’re actually a parent that’s not the experience at all. A lot of it just falls back on instinct right away, you use skills you didn’t even know you had, and before being put into that experience it probably seems like a steep learning curve, but the actual experience of living through it is different.

What the other folks on this thread have said about the magic of kids is absolutely right. I’ll add a few things, when you have young kids (especially more than one for the first 5 years or so) it is difficult to have hobbies (and be a good partner/dad) because the kids can be all consuming. This transition can be hard. But, I have never grown so much as a person, or found so much meaning and joy from anything else I have ever done in my life.

It's not actually that hard. It's time consuming and it can be all consuming if you let it. Or you can start cutting things out of your life that don't really matter. Having kids showed me how much of my life I was wasting.

Nothing gets easier as you get older, kids or not. You just get better.

This is true for entrepreneurship, and kids.

Kids are the closest thing to experiencing actual magic.

It’s the most stupefying technology you get to witness every day. Everything I write here won’t explain this but I’ll try anyways.

Late nights, pushing, juggling, constantly learning is something entrepreneurs do and transfers well.. but maybe not as common as it should be. Learning how to learn is a highly transferable skill.

There’s also not knowing what you don’t know until you get into it.

I’m a first time dad to twins. It was like waking up a part of myself when I didn’t know I was asleep. It’s hard to wake up someone who doesn’t know they’re asleep.

There are some interesting biological changes that open up in your brain, energy and other things after having kids, not just for the mother but the partner too. Fun research and reading for your interests, but it literally activates more of your brain. I see a new world of more opportunities and understand people better than ever have.

Super helpful in building product. I had no idea what the experience of many people are and it helped me simplify even more what I build.

To my earlier self I’d say..

Kids were not as much of a shock because of the fun stretches of startups I’ve been through, and all the interests I’ve been through in the past.

Having kids helps cut off any unnecessary entanglements, especially ones we’re not aware of.

Theres a chance to finally prioritize better than ever. The decisions make themselves, it’s a super power.

There’s a chance to become a morning person to have even more time.

There’s a chance to think about problems away from a keyboard that has build up the mental muscles again.

There might not be a better motivator and creator of discipline than having kids. Instead of scrolling motivational insta.

It’s true it can be hard work. 1 kid is nothing compared to having twins. I could do 1 kid in my sleep alone, but it’s only because I had to expand to the demands of twins. That’s what parenting does for some, increases their capacity.

Yes there can be late nights if you choose not to learn and put in routines.

There’s a chance of realizing what kind of memory you will be for your kids might be more important than you ever thought.

The mental cpu cycles aren’t that bad. There’s pretty good books and apps now (wonder weeks is one) that keeps things on the radar. Knowing your kid is going to have a growth week before they do is so helpful. You don’t feel as helpless.

My wife and I weren’t sure if kids would be in the cards for us, between life, work, our interests.

We did pretty much everything we wanted including sleeping in until we got bored of it.

We said to ourselves if we’re not 1 million percent sure we don’t want kids we should leave the door open or try for a family to be sure. There are some health issues before we began that were discovered that likely saved my wife’s life. Life seems so random, and then not it seems sometimes

Rather than have a fixed mindset in our 20s of having kids or not and hanging onto it for dear life we tried to stay open to possibility. I really recommend it. It turned out we’re not the same people in our 20s that we are in our 30s. Knowing is delusion sometimes, yet it’s all we seek.

You can change and grow - many things you believe turn out to be a bookmark to go open up again and update. It’s everything.

I’m not a “kid” person, basically never held a baby before we had our first this August.

As the child bearing person in this equation, I also did the most research on pregnancy, birth, subsequent baby stuff. (My partner did do some reading too, but not the same extent of feeling like he needed to figure it all out.)

One thing that’s interesting is that in many ways, even the pair of us who knew nothing about babies have pretty good instincts for what they need. We got some help from a post partum doula to show us baby care, since we figured you can’t learn all that from reading.

We did read some books. I tried to stay away from articles because they are incentivized to act like there’s conflict or “new” stuff to talk about to keep engaging readers. The most useful resource has been a private Reddit forum of other people who had babies the same month, so we can compare what’s worked for lots of people, what popular info seems totally wrong to lots of us, etc.

Kids aren’t easy, but they are not hard the same way our knowledge-worker jobs are to learn.

I was on an eight year run at Burning Man. Have the cool cat, sold a SaaS I built, could do and just about did anything.

Had our first born this past June, I see now how much more there can be.

I still do much of what I did before (BRC excepted). But there’s more gravity to my existence.

PG has an essay that describes having kids that you should read. It may not make an impact but perhaps it will join the chorus of replies here.

I’d say stay open to the possibility. Yes, you learn a lot. But if you enjoy knowledge, skill building and life experiences, having a kid is just as fascinating as any of that other stuff.

And your life gets wider and deeper.

In my view, it's a kind of mental paradigm shift. Before you have your own kids, they're an abstraction. Afterwards, they're people, and in fact they're your family.

I love my own kids, but I'm not sure I love kids. I don't choose to hang out in places where there are lots of kids. Nobody goes to a children's music recital or sports game unless their own kids are involved.

For many, that shift is not a hard edged step function. For instance if people grow up in large, tight knit families, then they've experienced kids and the relationship with family, before having their own. They may have participated in raising little kids. So they might not have fully experienced the paradigm shift, but have learned from cultural immersion that the shift is usually manageable and desirable.

Another paradigm shift is that before having kids, it's hard to judge whether articles like TFA are insightful, or twaddle. After having kids, you quickly learn that all parenting articles are twaddle. ;-)

HN people are overachievers... So invariably your approach to child rearing is going to be reading a lot and being informed. It's helpful to do so to know what's coming. But in reality you don't need to. A lot of learning will be on the job.

Yes, your free time disappears completely. But there is an upside. Watching a human being grow and learn is fascinating. Plus that human is a part of you in a sense. That is also beautiful and hard to describe in words.

People change and you may evolve your views. I know I have, esp when facing my own mortality. Turning back the time not possible, which makes such decisions very consequential.

Concieved first kid at 43. Kid is now 14 months and I am 44. Sometimes I do feel I should’ve shaved off a year or two, just because of general energy level and wanting to have a long life with my child. With that said, I am also glad I waited. Besides above, it’s the right time in my life for me. I actually never thought it would happen, but as I got older A feeling slowly crept up on me. Dying without leaving anything important behind. What is life, if not to pass it on. You may be weird. That’s ok. Live that life. You may not be weird. Ok too. But you will become weirder by choosing not to have children. Don’t take my word for it. The people you know over 40-45, are there more with than without children? Those without, do they seem a bit off the beaten path? Not implying they can’t be happy, I’m not correlating. Having a kid is hard. Stupid hard. Lot’s of responsibility and you can wave bye-bye to oh so many things you are used to. But by some magic, even after hours of crying, being fussy and the biggest pain in the ass, a little laugh and a 5 second smile can erase all the days hardships. This is HN, so lots of logic, rationality and reasoning. But with i child, magic does exist. Leave the world alone as you entered it, and everything you accumulated through life will be lost… like tears in rain.

Trying to expain the joy of children is like recommending to read a book about the joy of swimming. You simply have to make the experience to understand. For long periods of my life I felt detached from the world and from myself. With our two children I feel a deep and satisfying attachment unlike any other feeling. Reading a lot about puppies in the comments. Would sacrifice our beloved cat without blinking for our children if it were neccessary. Sorry Merlin, you are not only not in the same league, you are not in the same universe. The whole thing about loosing your freedom when having kids is taking it the wrong way. Your life is not about your ego any more, not about your comforts, your desires. Its about your child. You become the path and the foundation. There is something deeply satisfying being there for them.

I dunno man, it was all pretty natural for me. My first wife, not so much. Her only real solution was to stuff a boob in my oldests mouth. My 2nd wife, with my youngest is also a natural, and my youngest was pretty easy. Until he wesponized the high chair to do things like get into the chocolate (was hilarious when he got a block of unsweetened baking chocolate).

We were definately a dog family, when we had our first born kid, untill she was 2 years old there were so many things we related to same as a puppy

Having had multiple kids, I can tell you some babies cry for a reason, and some may have a reason but you can never figure it out.

One thing I thought was interesting that came out of the AAP book, "Caring for your Baby and Young Child," was that sometimes babies cry to just to get energy out before getting to a more contented state.

It's not always something that needs to be "fixed" right away. It also mentions, as do several other sleep books, that many babies need to cry as part of going to sleep (after the newborn phase).

This is a really important point - your own mental state is so crucial. Kids are hard, they can’t communicate well (or at all), and it’s the parent's job to figure out. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and consumed with emotions. Being ok with taking a break given everyone is safe helps rebuild energy and perspective. Especially true for new parents - after the first you become more intuitive and understand the grind.

I have a 4 month old and my Apple Watch kept warning me to move to a quieter location while I was changing his diaper. Eventually it started aggravating my tinnitus.

Now I have 2 pairs of sound dampening earmuffs like you’d wear to a gun range for diaper changes. 1 pair upstairs and 1 downstairs. I highly recommend it.

Think about all the headaches a baby is likely to have with a soft skull and a rapidly growing body. I think sometimes they just hurt and there's no way for you to remedy it. They just need to cry it out.

Now that is good advice!

It is relatively common to bottle feed here, either with pumped breast milk or formula.

Very common, although breastfeeding is also common. In our case, we primarily breastfeed but supplement with formula.

Some thirty years ago, as my parents would tell it, people would primarily just use formula.

Breastfeeding is hard. A lot of moms try and have a hard time getting through “the wall” of the first week or two. Taking nothing away from them, it’s very hard, more so if the difficulty wasn’t anticipated ahead of time.

I’ve watched my wife do it three times, with the 3rd time being right now with a 6 week old.

The U.S. doesn't have guaranteed maternity leave. Even 4 months is considered generous. Many people will pump breast milk during the day, and deliver it to the baby in a bottle.

Why? Do you think something's wrong with that?

It's a mix, some do some don't. About 30 years ago it was not common at all, but there has been a huge reversal.

The messaging right now is that breastfeeding is better, but be careful not to oversell it so that you don't make those who can't feel bad.

In this specific case, breastfeeding twins is harder than breastfeeding single kid. Booby factory might be overworked due to increased demand :)

Colic is really bad, it hurts the baby quite a bit, so they'll cry non-stop, which makes the adults crazy. If you have such a baby, it helps to remember how badly it's hurting them.

Have you ever had really bad heartburn? Now imagine that for hours on end, with no ability to do anything about it.

When I was an infant in the 70s my mom, a RN, went with the fad and switched me to soy milk, away from dairy. I started becoming sick all the time and having issues. One day my dad, who took care of me most of the time, got sick of it and switched me back to cows milk. I got better and became normal. The soy went in the trash. Even now I can't tolerate soy protein. I'm not allergic, I just can't seem to digest it. I still love cows milk though.

Well, I don't think people need to try every random trick in the hopes that one magically works, but all the basic options, yea, especially holding them against your body. The main aim should be to prevent lifelong emotional damage, not to help the parents get some sleep. Some parents try to train them not to cry by leaving them alone! That apparently even works but it's pretty horrifying since if it's done wrong, it also trains them to be incapable of maintaining secure adult relationships later in life.

* If you're ok with the added risk.

Yikes. Please don’t co-sleep. Sure, you might get to sleep but one of you may not make it through the night.

Pacifiers not good, not necessary, many downsides. We never used them for these reasons.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/infant-and-todd...

To echo the other commenters on this article, all babies are different and there are fairly few universal truths to soothing newborns. For example neither a pacifier nor driving worked for mine.

My only advice is to try everything until you find something that sticks.

In the category of “no universal truths for babies”… my partner and I were hesitant to use pacifiers due to some of the negatives around jaw and mouth development (zero judgement for people who do use them). We agonized over whether we were overthinking it, whether it would help him sleep… but eventually we broke down and gave our kid one. To our surprise, he hated it. Wouldn’t keep it in his mouth at all, and all our thinking was for nothing.

> driving. Driving your kid around will often soothe them.

Same here. Doing a walk with the stroller and I'd be looking at 45 minutes before the kid would fall asleep. Taking the car and driving once around the block and my kid was sleeping. I don't know if it's the movement, the fact that it's faster than walking, the vibrations, the engine noise (I wonder if parents with electric cars use that trick too) or something else: but for me and for many others the car trick simply works. Not the most ecological thing to do but, well, I was lucky in that mine would fall asleep in the car nearly instantly.

A lot of the techniques, such as these, really seem to be just imitating what a fully attentive mother without modern parenting aids would be doing. ie. carrying the baby on her body all day, and allowing it to breastfeed at will. Pacifier = artificial nipple, isn't it?

The only pacifiers my baby liked were the Tommee Tippie Featherlights.

Unfortunately this is also the only pacifier he could CRAM COMPLETELY INTO HIS MOUTH by ten months.

Fortunately he took confiscation pretty well, and didn’t revert to wanting one when he started daycare and saw all the other little kids running around with them

When my wife went back to work and I took over taking care of our 2 month old, I decided to do the whole “cry to sleep” thing. I put her down when she was close to sleep but not there yet, and basically let her cry. If in ~10 minutes she wasn’t asleep I’d go pick her up and try again.

Full on crying fits were rare. She usually squawked and did some light cries. Within 2 or 3 days not only was putting her to sleep way easier but she started sleeping a full 11 or 12 hours through the night.

We still use a white noise machine, dark room, and a sleep sack (sometimes a weighted one). I think I’m going to start cracking the shades to her window during naps so she is better at napping in homes without a dark room.

All that said, there’s a reason I had to do that and not my wife. I could tell she was itching to go in at her distress, to the point where I would take the video monitor away from her. From what I read we also had better luck with it than most in that usually it takes a good week or so for it to work.

TLDR: Stop being such a millennial and let the baby cry ;)

Our 7mo old will sleep with a bottle of milk in the cot with her propped up by a blanket, which is our night time routine. Or with a blanket on her cheek. Or she’ll fall asleep in my arms while watching TV, but will wake up immediately and dance a jig if I try to put her in the cot. She also falls asleep in the baby carrier after 10mims if walking around, after which I can put her in the cot most times.

She’s fallen asleep while sat by herself about 4 times.

I heard white noise can mess with their development—it’s important to be able to sleep with random background noises like a door opening or a pencil dropping, so we never used it much.

Negative. There is very little good scientific evidence that it is important to breastfeed. But even if we stipulate that mothers must breastfeed, many working women pump milk during the day if they don't have unlimited paid time off after birth. In such cases bottles must obviously be used. And many women cannot produce enough breastmilk, and must supplement with formula. And many other possible reasons why bottles must be used.

Anyway, one thing we can say for sure: if it's not your kid and you weren't specifically asked for advice, don't tell someone they should have been breastfeeding.

You can pump and get mother's milk from a bottle. He even addresses that one quickly got exhausted on the breast.

I had to give up on direct breastfeeding and switch to the pump with mine when at five weeks, he wasn’t gaining weight. Exclusive pumping for a week showed that I wasn’t producing nearly enough, so we supplemented with formula to get him back gaining weight. With a strict pumping routine, I was able to get him off formula after a few weeks.

I ended up mostly pumping until he was about four months, then completely - he was never that great at nursing. Yes, I tried lactation consultants. Helped a bit, but thank god for modern pumps and formula. And Baby Buddy (made sure he was getting enough in - he would go eight hours without complaint at one month, which is obviously a problem)

As to twins, breastfeeding one infant is a full time job requiring both hands - I can’t imagine having to feed two at once only from breast! Some supplementation is probably necessary for most of them.

Debugging babies would be a good O'reilly book, wonder what animal cover the would use.

Three boys and two girls here.

If you count my brother as friend then it changes to four boys

All of my friends and ourselves have boys. Random distribution is random.

Some fraction of HN's readership currently has a newborn clearly. Including myself, hence posting at 5am