- Research finds understanding a baby’s cries comes with experience
Someone with no childcare experience may think a baby needs to be fed, changed, or put to bed when they cry, as these seem like their key needs, but a parent may know exactly what the baby is trying to express when it cries. While this may seem like motherly or parental instinct, research finds that decoding a baby’s cry comes down to experience in childcare, even if you are not a parent.
According to a study carried out by Siloé Corvin, Camille Fauchon, Roland Peyron, David Reby, and Nicolas Mathevon, parents with young children are better at decoding babies’ cries than adults with no childcare skills. Published in Current Biology, the study is titled, “Adults learn to identify pain in babies’ cries”.
The authors explained that an assumption is made that adult listeners should be able to detect when a crying baby is experiencing pain because of universal acoustic features. However, their study found that this involves a learning process.
“Our psychoacoustic experiments reveal that adults with no experience of caring for babies are unable to identify whether a baby’s cry is a pain cry induced by vaccination or a mild discomfort cry recorded during a bath, even when they are familiar with the discomfort cries from this particular baby.”
This contrasts with people with childcare skills or prior experience with babies, as they can identify a familiar baby’s pain cries without having heard them before.
“Parents of very young children are even able to identify the pain cries of a baby who is completely unfamiliar to them. Exposure through caregiving and/or parenting thus shapes the auditory and cognitive abilities involved in decoding the information conveyed by the baby’s communication signals.”
The authors said that babies expressing pain, as opposed to mild discomfort, have cries that are longer, louder, harsher and rougher, and have a more variable pitch. For the study, they recorded the cries produced by babies in two contexts; mild discomfort during bathtime and pain cries during a vaccination sequence.
They then conducted psychoacoustic experiments with adult participants who had different levels of experience with babies. Some had no experience, some were non-parents with moderate, non-professional experience (occasional babysitting or caring for younger siblings), some were parents with children at least five years old at the time of the experiments, some were parents with babies less than two years old, and others were non-parents with extensive professional caregiving experience.
The study found that nonparents without experience with babies were unable to identify either context better than chance, while nonparents with moderate experience showed a moderate ability to identify the crying context.
However, adults with strong experience with babies, either because they were parents or because they were paediatric care professionals, identified the crying context of their familiar baby better than chance.
“Remarkably, parents of younger babies were also able to identify the crying contexts of an unknown baby they had never heard before,” the authors stated, adding: “Interestingly, both parents of children older than five and non-parents with extensive experience performed at chance level in their ability to identify pain cries from an unfamiliar baby, consistent with observations indicating that experienced listeners can develop a resistance that decreases their sensitivity to acoustic cues of pain.”
The authors went on to say that their study shows that it is through experience that diverse caregivers become expert interpreters of the infants’ cries, allowing them to efficiently identify, and thus appropriately respond, to the encoding of pain in cries.
“We found that adults can recognise signals of pain as opposed to mild discomfort in babies’ cries, but that ability requires prior experience,” Siloé Corvin said.
She explained that babies express their pain or discomfort through cries and vocalisations, adding: “There are other ways to tell if a baby is in pain, for example by its facial expressions or posture, but cries can give us additional information about how the baby is feeling.”
Corvin went on to say that the ability to distinguish between pain and discomfort comes quickly, starting within the first few hours of a baby’s life. Thus, by the time the baby is two or three months old, most parents know what different cries mean.