The first time I saw a woman distract a child when he fell and was crying, I was confused. Why would a mother want to do that? My mother explained that when distracted, a child stops crying because it forgets its pain. It still didn’t make sense to me. Why would you want a baby to forget its pain? Took me a lot of years to realize that I really was onto something.

Needs Vs Wants

Until a baby is three months old or so, it can only cry every time it has a need. It is either hungry or has wet itself, or there is some other problem. For these three months, a child needs the complete attention of the parent, and mothers often see an (almost) inhuman increase in endurance and capacity during this time.

After this though, the ‘drama’ begins. The child starts to learn that crying has its own merits. The easiest way to manipulate its parent is to scream its lungs out. It drives most parents crazy, and most of them relent, thinking oh come on, how much damage can it do if he gets this one extra toy, or plays that one extra game?

How Much Damage Can it Do?

Children are learning rapidly at this age, and this learning is geared to teach them how to survive in the world. Parents represent the world at this age. Therefore, when we fulfill their needs every time they cry, we teach them that the world is a safe, nourishing and loving place. Every time we give in when they cry for the wrong reasons, we teach them that crying is a fruitful exercise. If you want something from life, just cry.

We can see this in play already. Our own generation was mostly raised by working parents in nuclear families. Depression today is at an all time high, and the numbers are only rising. What did our parents do wrong?

They taught us that it is profitable to cry.

When you really delve deep into depression, you find that it is essentially your fight against life. Life hasn’t given you what you wanted. And now you want to be miserable, because maybe if you are miserable long enough, life will feel guilty enough to give you what you want. When you’re deeply connected with yourself, you realize that you don’t really want to get out of your depression or anxiety or anger, because then you fear that things might remain the same. So you hold on to the misery. Is it worth it?

What are we doing to our kids in the name of love?

Every time we distract a child, we teach it that the best way to deal with pain is to pretend it doesn’t exist, and to focus our attention on something new. Over time, the child has no idea how to handle his/ her emotions and will end up having physical or mental disease when things reach a breaking point.

Every time you give in to your child’s unreasonable cries, you are teaching your baby that whenever it cries, life will fulfill it’s demands. It will grow up to be a miserable, depressed person, because there are many times life doesn’t work out our way, and this child was taught that it is not through hard work but through crying that you get what you want. And the child wasn’t taught that sometimes you never get what you want, and you’ve just got to deal with that.

So what do we do?

Well, the title says it all. Let your baby cry. Not the sort of crying where you look the other way and pretend nothing is happening. Look at your child. Let him/ her cry. Watch. Just don’t reach out and hug or try to comfort in any way. Remain at a distance, and feel your own pain. Let your heart scream. Of course it will, that is natural.

And when you settle into your own pain, without trying to run away from it, you teach your child by example, that sometimes bad things happen, bad feelings come. But if you just sit through it, it will go away. Then you just get up, wipe your tears, and move on.