Crying babies
Over the weekend, my husband and I babysat for two kids for a couple of hours. (After almost 5 years of trying, we’ve finally managed to join a functioning babysitting coop!) The three-year-old was happy to play with our boys (and their toys), but the nine-month-old was quite upset to wake up in a strange place and cried most of the time she was here. After trying the obvious problems (interested in bottle? needs a fresh diaper?), T. and I took turns walking back and forth with her, singing in her ear. She seemed to be happier with T. holding her, maybe because he can carry a tune, maybe because he was less disturbingly like-mommy but not-mommy.
Tertia had a pair of interesting posts recently, in which she talked about a incident where her daughter was crying while she was getting the babies ready for a bath. Rose (her nanny) heard her, came in, and without saying anything took Kate, who immediately calmed down. Tertia asked her readers what their reaction would be, and then shared hers: a moment of jealousy and anger, followed by gladness that her children have another person in their lives who loves them so much and is able to make them happy and appreciation that Rose is comfortable enough with her role to do that.
I know that when the boys were babies, I always felt a ton of mixed emotions whenever T was able to calm them down when I wasn’t — glad that they weren’t screaming in my ear any more, but also profound insecurity in my parenting skills. And I’m sure T felt the same way when I did it — and I did it more often, because I had the unfair advantage of being the provider of magic mommy milk. And, over time, we both got more confident and recognized that the boys’ passing preferences weren’t something to get worked up over. (Not that we still don’t cringe when they insist on one of us over the other.)
That said, I do believe that it’s important to let both parents (and any other key caregivers) develop their own sets of soothing skills and a sense of competency. And sometimes that does mean the more experienced parent (or caregiver) standing back and letting the other one figure it out on their own. If someone is always rushing in to bail you out as soon as it gets rough, you’re never going to learn. (Tertia did say that, based on her reaction, she’s going to work harder not to rescue her husband when he’s struggling.)
I had a few minutes in a bookstore the other day, and I picked up the Mommy Wars book, and turned to Carolyn Hax’s essay. Hax is the author of Tell Me About It, the Post’s advice column, and the mom of three kids under three. I usually think her advice is right on target, and so when I heard that she had written one of the essays, I was interested in hearing what she had to say. She acknowledges that she stepped right into the middle of the mommy wars in a column before she had kids, but says that now, her only test for parents is "would you want to be your own kid?"
I think that’s a useful perspective to bring to the daycare debate, more useful than the studies I’ve talked about before. There are lots of happy thriving kids in parental care, and lots of happy thriving kids in paid care, and their parents shouldn’t be worrying about whether their kid might have slightly higher test scores down the road if they were doing something different. But if your kid isn’t happy, it’s worth thinking about what might be changed — whether it’s a setting with more or fewer other kids around, more or less structure, whatever makes sense.
I’m not saying that this makes for easy answers. Let’s go back to crying babies. What do you do if you’re a working parent and your child cries every day when you drop him off at child care? Especially if your child is too young to explain what’s going on in words. Lots of kids cry a bit and then settle in and have fun the rest of the day, but what if yours doesn’t? How long do you wait before concluding that this is more than just a transitional problem? And what do you do then?
March 16th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Just this morning I had this problem when dropping off my son at preschool. He’s almost 4, has never had a problem with preschool before, yet this morning completely fell apart. He was sobbing as the teachers guided him into the room; they eventually encouraged me to leave, and when I picked him up he was fine (hmm… the summary version seems must less heart-wrenching than the post I composed when I got home from dropping him off!).
It broke my heart to leave him, but I trusted the teachers when they said that he would be okay. He was, but I hope it wasn’t at too high a cost. I guess this isn’t quite the scenario you described in your post; I’m not sure how I’d handle things if this were a recurrent problem.
March 16th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
We are facing this problem with our son, who is nearly 4 as well. He has been very happy in this daycare, and we’ve been pleased with them. However, early this year (january), he began to cry about going in the morning and to have crying fits at being dropped off. When we investigated, it turned out he was having alot of conflicts with the child who had been his up-til-then best friend, including interactions in which the other child bit him, and bouts in which both yelled mean things at one another such as “I’m not your friend”. These conflicts were interspersed with moments where they were again inseparable. The other child’s mother was also perplexed. THe director of the daycare did some observing and wasn’t sure what to do – in her view, they appeared to be fighting over ‘mindreading’ issues and also would reunite even when separated by their teacher. Finally, after things did not improve, and our son continued to sob about having to go to daycare, we asked to have him switched to a different classroom. They did so immediately, placing him in a room with one of their best teachers and considering the likely dynamics among children in all the potential rooms. We’ve only been in the new room for two days, so we can’t know for sure if this will resolve things, but my husband said that the ‘drop-off’ went well today – no crying and no tantrumming. This is one of the most stressful experiences we have had as parents. It made me really question a sometimes unexamined downside of daycare – exposure early on to interpersonal hurts that the kids are ill-equipped to handle on their own, and which unfortunately we adults are ill-equipped to assist with.
so, no solutions. we are wondering how much of this may be developmental in nature, so maybe other people weighing in about it could be suggestive. i’m a developmental psychologist myself, but 1) i work in the adolescence-adulthood and old age part of the lifespan and 2) child developmentalists have not looked at daycare in quite the right ways to be helpful on this issue, at least in terms of published work.
March 16th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
I’ve always figured the more adults my kids knew, the better for them: more possible role models and a bigger support system, especially if they didn’t click with me or their dad, or in the extremely unlikely event that one of us became absent (dead or too sick to care for the kids). Sure, I got jealous–and I reminded myself that I’m still special to them no matter how many loving relationships they have in their lives.
March 16th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
I just kind of structure my life so that I can spend some time with A. at her daycare before I take off; it’s one of those friendly hippie places where there isn’t much structure and you can just hang around. And yes, she milks it. I figure that’s fine. Very occasionally there’s serious crying, and then after a while I hand her over to one of the wonderful underpaid people there, and go. They know they can call me if there’s something seriously wrong.
It’s actually one of the reasons I decided against the Montessori for fall. I don’t want to be shooed away at any particular time; I want to be able to wander in & out as part of the place. School’s going to be a rude shock, and the closer it gets, the dumber it looks in oh so many ways.
March 16th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
I still remember the night when Em was maybe six weeks old, that she was crying, and Baroy was trying to calm her, and it was making every hormone in my body SCREAM, so I tried to take her from him. What followed was a HUGE fight at the end of which he essentially kicked me out of the house, told me to go somewhere for at least an hour, and let him learn how to calm her. I drove and drove, in tears the entire time, but when I got home (45 minutes later; I just couldn’t stand it another minute), she was asleep in his arms.
It wasn’t until a year or so later than he admitted to me that she’d only fallen asleep minutes before I walked in, after essentially screaming herself hoarse. 😉 But that doesn’t change the take-home I got from the experience, which was to stop let him figure out how to parent for himself, lest I destroy both his and Em’s future relationship as well as our present one.
None of this is to say that it didn’t just KILL me to watch him ‘do it all wrong,’ of course. 😉 But Em is 8 now, they have a fabulous, unique relationship, and he and I are celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary tomorrow. So it was worth the sacrifice.
March 16th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
My little guy turned two in early January and moved up a class in his daycare. It was a big change for him–new room, new teachers, new drop-off routine. It took nearly two months for him to not cry when I dropped him off. Today, I’d say four days out of five, he just kisses me good-bye without another thought. But that fifth day can be such a bummer for us if he’s feeling extra sad or tired.
I’ve always wanted my son to have as many caring adults in his life as I could cram in there. There’s a teacher at his daycare who hugs him and tells him she loves him at the end of each day, and it makes me so happy to know that he is spending his time away from me with people who truly love and care for him.
I know that separation anxiety is part of the deal with kids, and that just because he’s fine today doesn’t mean that he won’t be next week. But I hope that I’ve helped him build some trust with other adults–people who are with him every day–and that we can help him through that together.
March 16th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
We’ve just gone through a couple of weeks where our 2.5 year-old son has been complaining about going to daycare every morning, which is an abrupt departure. I asked a lot of different teachers at the school about it, and they all agreed that nothing in particular seemed to be happening with him there–no fighting with kids, he was engaged and happy, he didn’t cry excessively–so we chalked it up to a developmental stage. It’s still hard to deal with the crying (although it’s gone from every day to about once a week), but I know that it’s not caused by his general misery there.
September 20th, 2006 at 11:58 am
I have a 5 month old son. I work from home, in fact just started back from maternity leave a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t been successful in getting a babysitter yet so i have to work and take care of my son’s needs. I’ve worked up a decent schedule, but my main problem is when I have meetings. I keep him in the crib as that’s the safest, and he starts to cry himself into a state. Otherwise he’s basically a cheerful baby. I worry that all that crying will harm him in some way, though I go in every few minutes to give him a pacifier, or pat him (while having pressed the mute button!), but his crying doesn’t stop, and can continue for over half hour to 45 minutes. I don’t know how to get him to stop crying during those times…any suggestions?