Fathers Recognize Their Babies’ Cries Just as Well as Mothers | Hacker News Reader

Fathers Recognize Their Babies’ Cries Just as Well as Mothers

blogs.smithsonianmag.com

66 pointsjacobr41 comments

I'm three months into my half of our evenly-split year of parental leave. If you have the legal ability to do this, do it.

Most cough civilized cough countries allow both parents to take some form of leave - here in Canada it's 12 months to be divvied up, with only 4ish of which are required to go to the birth parent. The EI system pays you EI benefits (half your regular wage or $25k/yr, whichever is less), and your employer's only responsibility is to keep your space available for when you get back.

Let me tell you, staying home with my kids and doing the stay-at-home dad thing has been Goddamned magical. I'm constantly exhausted and exasperated by my three little juggernauts, but I'm loving it.

And yeah, I'm getting all those instincts out the yin-yang. I can perfectly understand my two-year-old's incoherent babble, I can distinguish a cry at a hundred paces, I've got the lightning parental reflexes, etc.

Do it.

Mileage varies. I was reasonably tuned to a lot of this stuff, and I was working 60-80 hour weeks. Part of it is just feeling that it is your responsibility to deal with this stuff.

My wife was definitely _more_ aware, but I wasn't far behind. She could leave for a weekend and it wasn't a problem, I needed a rundown on where stuff was and schedule but I handled the kids just fine.

Yes, I did sleep through more of their crying. But the time my daughter woke screaming from some nightmare, I was up the staircase before I woke up. Seriously, my first conscious memory was my foot pushing up a stair. My wife appeared three minutes later asking if the baby had cried. When the daughter wandered into the woods and lost herself I was looking for her five minutes before any one else noticed she was gone. Et cetera.

Which isn't to knock what you are doing, just to say it isn't the only way.

Out of curiosity, what happens if you have multiple kids in sequential years? Do you get three years off and $25k each year for three kids? How far does that extend? 18 months seems like a long time to take off from working, even if it is broken up across multiple years.

"Most cough civilized cough countries"

God damnit not this shit again - were you really unable to constrain yourself from slipping in this self-righteous part turning your otherwise OK (even if devoid of real content) post into a holier-than-thou political statement?

TL;DR: Parents, including fathers, who spend more time with their babies come to recognize their cries better.

Not sure if that's really as counter-intuitive as the article suggests.

They explains this in the article. They cite a study that show that around 50% of people think than mothers are better at recognize their child cries than fathers.

"But previous studies didn't take into account the amount of time parents typically spent with their children on a daily basis."

I'm saying the new finding that "more time -> better able to recognize" is also not surprising.

You were offered evidence; you are not offering counter-evidence.

> Every mother participating in the study spent enough time with their kids to develop the skill tested, while just about half of the fathers did

It seems like this data explains that stereotype. Mothers are often "better" at it because they often spend the time with their kids to develop that skill.

> Not sure if that's really as counter-intuitive as the article suggests.

At least it is a comprehensible argument against the myth that women are intrinsically or genetically better at it than men.

When my child was born, one of the first things my mother told me was that there is a special link between the mother and child that men underestimate. She was warned me that as a father, whatever happens I will never be as close to my child as his mother would be.

That was her intuition as a mother. Again when you hear the discussions about which side a child should go during a divorce, 'children goes with the mother' is a baseline, and you have to bring up severe flaws in the personality or sociability of the mother to have the father considered as a viable alternative (at least that's how it went with my relatives)

Studies focusing on the parents skills and involvment in the child's life often bring seemingly obvious but still counter to the general population's concensus results.

Similar experience here. I believe, if the mother is breast-feeding, then she inevitably has more bonding time with the baby and they will establish a deeper relationship then with the father. Playing around during swaddling is then the only chance in the first months, where the father can have "quality time" with his baby.

One-off anecdotal proof exists as well:

I'm at a recent multiple family gathering at a friend's house. All the Dads are playing a hand of cards, the collective of kids playing in the basement. A quick yelp is released, and we all look up, everyone attentively listening for the follow-on cry. The secondary, longer cry happens and one of the Dads acknowledges: "that's mine, I'll be right back."

This is standard operating procedure, and has evolved as the kids have gotten older. Now, when our 10-11-12 year olds let out a welp, the Dad-in-question will generally yell out: "everything OK down there? Does anyone need help?"

And as I've spent more time with others' offspring, I can detect their voices (and cries) as well. It's environmental.

I have four kids and it works with me too. It is a funny thing, to be at a large kids' birthday party and then suddenly your ears can pick out the sound that your child is making amongst all the other noise. It also helps that my kids all sound similar in how they cry, so I think it is partly training (hearing the kid cry over the years) and genetics (my kids all sound similar when they cry).

I find the other parents can also distinguish their children. It has never seemed to me to be a mother or father dominant trait. An involved parent trait possibly, but not gender related.

I'd also note that parents notice a distressed child before non-parents do - at least in our group of friends. Hypersensitised hearing I think.

In other news, if a live-in infant caregiver (male or female) that you have hired spends more time with the baby than the natural parents do, he/she will recognize the baby's cries better than the natural parents. Also, parents who adopt an infant child. Or hospital workers in children's ICU.

It's simple pattern recognition, just as how an experienced musician might be able to tell when someone else is playing their cowbell ("It has this very particular clonk when hit on the side") better than their non-musical spouse could.

Hrmph. Not according to my mother-in-law. As a father I'll never understand the bond between mother and child.

Although she may note that having you dislike socializing with her seems to result in shorter visits and less of them. Presumably also affecting child/grandparent bonding.

This makes sense. To me this shows we're a well adapted species capable of filling the shoes of another when need be. This fact can't be more evident by the fact when my partner does night shifts she makes sure everything is ready to go as I am hopeless at cooking. I step up to the plate and adapt to the situation I wouldn't usually be in charge of handling.

I used to always think it was only mothers who could recognise the cries of their child, but it does make sense if you spend enough time that you develop a maternal instinct. We are firm believers we're free to live our lives how we choose, but can't ignore the fact we're programmed from the beginning to be a certain way already.

Nitpick but:

'Maternal' instinct -> motherly instinct

Isn't the linked article describing this as a behavior that is common to parents of either gender? We merely assume that it is a maternal instinct.

"The factor that best predicted which parents were best at identifying their child’s cries was the amount of time the parent spent with their babies, regardless of if they were the mother or father."

This does not describe a maternal instinct that happens to be approximated by fathers, to me. It describes a parental instinct that is not gender-related.

We merely assume that it is a maternal instinct

I've noticed that our society seems to overrate the whole category, perhaps out of deference to the women who bear the brunt of having children, perhaps to help reassure young women considering children.

Or to excuse absentee fathers, and the striking disparities in unpaid work between the sexes, globally?

You mean paternal instinct?

Or do you imply that recognizing a cry is a "mother" thing, even if a father does it?

I meant paternal instinct, I wrote the comment whilst on the train and now can't edit it. But definitely not saying that crying is purely a mother thing.

I could have told you that. I can tell you that the same mechanism works for your own dog's barks, too, something my wife and I have laughed about recently.

Science doesn't work by "I could have told you that". It works by proposing an hypothesis and then testing it (preferably over and over again). Scientists cannot skip the testing stage just because the hypothesis is 'obvious'. Because once every few hundred experiments your obvious hypothesis based on intuition, personal experience and anecdote turns out to be wrong.

Not only that, we can tell by the sound if the cries what they want. For instance, our first child had three cries: bad diaper, feed me, and hold me. I knew exactly what she wanted from the sound of her cry.

@sabat, you're hellbanned. Looking through your comment history I can't tell why.

His comment:

>Anecdotally, when my son was a baby, I definitely knew his cry, and it felt instinctual (although in truth, it's probably just subconscious recognition).

The comment that triggered the hellban was:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399303

"I love how Jason Fried, the most self-important man in software (who can't code) is first on the list to diss the security patches. Fuck you, Jason. Learn to code. Then you can diss."

I imagine that telling someone "fuck you" directly is a hellbannable offense (even if the sentiment is genuine)

I'd expect more than a single off-color comment before banning someone. This particular user has a long set of perfectly valid and relevant comments throughout his comment history. There should be a pervasive problem with the user that fails to be resolved, even after an open dialog with others, before the community resorts to the boot. Even then, there's no reason for a hell ban specifically. Hell bans are meant to throw off unmonitored spammers who aren't meticulous enough to check that they do in fact have clean accounts to spam through. The Jesus-Spam that's been making the rounds recently is a good example; lots of Bible verses and more or less the exact same message in every post, not at all relevant to the link. Obvious spam. Sabat obviously isn't in this category.

However, the moderation system on HN isn't even opaque; it's a pitch black box. Zero accountability.

What you refer to as "Jesus-Spam" is the tragic rambling (and randomly generated "messages from God") of a talented software developer with schizophrenia.

http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html

https://www.hnsearch.com/search?q=losethos

https://www.hnsearch.com/search?q=sparrowos

And the messages are not random! If you read them you'll see they always have relevance to the topic at hand.

Usually I've seen a paragraph or two of related and often insightful commentary, interspersed with randomly selected biblical verses or Markov chains (the "God says" sections).

I've known two people that have been hell banned here for single one-off comments. In both cases it had to do with supposedly disrespecting prominent Silicon Valley big shots that are worshiped on HN (eg in one case it was about Chris Dixon).

In my opinion the fastest way to get banned from HN, is to say anything negative about the elites. Even if you're just criticizing, that'll be enough to do it.

Zero accountability indeed.

Were they profane comments? Telling someone to fuck themselves isn't exactly the most appropriate thing to say

The next comment was also very "unpolite": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399305 Perhaps it triggered the hellbanning.

That's not that bad is it. Yes, it's wrong to say someone cant criticize something they couldn't do better, but it wasn't that offensive was it? I'd say a bit of down voting would have had the desired correctional effect.

In the spectrum of inappropriate things to say, this is far from the worst. My point was that 'Fuck you, Jason' is never appropriate. I don't think he would have been hell banned had he said 'screw you' or just omitted the three words, but saying 'Fuck you, Jason' crosses the line (and to be fair, I don't disagree with Sabat's point)

If sabat is hellbanned, how did you see his comment, and if you saw his comment, how did you know he was hellbanned?

There is a mechanism called showdead that allows you to see hellbanned comments. It's in your profile.

+1 thanks

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