Why A Baby Cries At Night

One of the most common complaints that mothers make about their young children is that they wake regularly at night.

Such children about one in five of all babies are exhausting, and their persistent waking, often accompanied by incessant crying, can be a serious problem. In a number of popular manuals on how to bring up babies, suggested that night waking can be avoided by leaving the child to cry or by other such rigid procedures. This is wrong. Parental mishandling does not cause night waking and parents should not feel that they are to blame if their baby wakes at night.

There was no question of this ‘creating’ children who were likely to cry a lot and hence, perhaps, cry more often at night on waking. It seems to reflect a different character in the crying of these children, perhaps as a result of the events surrounding their birth, and the mothers seem to know that this crying will not be stopped by leaving the baby alone.

The study also suggests that night waking could be predicted at birth and such help as is available begin right away. This, best of all, would arm the mother against people who try to tell her that she herself to blame.