Understanding, accompanying and calming my crying baby.

From the child's point of view, crying is a signal that indicates a need. We would like to explain to you what baby crying is all about and what options there are for accompanying your baby with understanding. It is important to know the different types of crying in order to be able to respond better to our children's crying:

Needs crying

Needs crying is the child's way of speaking and can mean hunger, a desire for attention and social play, for physical closeness or for rest and sleep. If the parents manage to accompany this phase in peace, they feel encouraged and reassured. Experience has shown that pain and illness are usually only 10% of the reason for crying - and only rarely can the crying be influenced by treating the pain.

Resonance crying

Here the child reacts to stimuli in its environment. Even in the first few days of life, newborns are confronted with many new experiences and challenges: The baby is exposed to many new stimuli, such as visits during labour or noises from the radio and television. There may also be unspoken partnership problems that the little one senses. All of this overstimulates babies and leads to them being restless, unable to sleep and ultimately crying a lot. Caution: Resonance crying is often interpreted as need crying. As a result, the worried parents can no longer find their own peace. The result is anxiety and despair for parents and child, and thus a vicious circle. Many parents do not feel understood and then seek help. The result is that they are put off by professional helpers with the argument that the crying is a temporary developmental phenomenon ("three-month colic"), or they are considered incompetent and complicated. However, this does not provide a solution.

Memory crying

This crying often manifests itself as excessive or unspecific crying and is a huge burden for parents. Behind such crying episodes are memories that babies have experienced during pregnancy and birth and process in dreams. Understanding for the prenatal world of experience can be awakened and brought closer to the parents. This creates recognition for the child's way of expressing itself. However, memory crying can also be triggered by a noise, a hasty or surprising movement, a colour or a smell, so that babies start to cry for no apparent reason. This is where they need our presence and attention.

What do parents struggle with while crying?

• Loss of orientation ("I don't understand it!")
• Loss of emotional control ("It's overwhelming me")
• Loss of self-efficacy ("I can't do anything")
• Exhaustion syndrome ("I can't take any more")

And what helps to calm the stress situation? Slowing down and calming down helps to adjust to the slow world of children. A quiet conversation creates access to the inner state of mind. Calmness and self-connection through conscious breathing make it easier for parents to empathise with their child's behaviour and body language and to respond to it. In this resonance, the child learns to experience itself as self-effective and secure. In order to achieve this state of readiness to bond, short-term professional support is needed in the situation of a frequently crying child.

We can support you

We offer you 1-2 sessions of approx. 1.5 hours each to develop strategies on how you can sensitively accompany your crying baby. We often find that parents are quickly able to relax themselves and thus learn to offer the child the security it needs to accompany its crying.

Content of a session

• Training your own stress management
• Finding a regular daily rhythm with the child
• Recognising the child's body language
• Finding ways to relieve stress in the parents' personal environment