I know that I have been going around the same topic for a few weeks, but since I keep reading new arguments to validate something so logical that it falls under its own weight, I return to the topic because today's new argument can calmly serve to explain to Estivill, to his professional friends who love to let them cry and to anyone who tells us that nothing happens to let them cry, or that it is good, why we should not do it.
And is that a study conducted with adults, subjected to different noises of the most annoying, shows that the worst, the most unbearable of all, the one that bothers us the most is the crying of the baby.
The study I commented was published in the magazine The Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology and it concludes that humans can better withstand the noise of a pneumatic hammer or that of a plane in flush flight than the cry of a small child.
To do the study, the researchers performed several mathematical tests on adults while listening to different sounds, from a conversation between adults, the noise of a machine, the flight of a plane, the babble, the cries and cries of children, etc. .
Apparently, the noises that most bothered the participants, making them make more mistakes when doing the tests, were those who came from babies, and especially the cries of babies.
Why does it bother us so much to hear them cry
It is surprising, really, that the crying of a baby bothers us more than many other noises the sea of annoying. Or perhaps, if we apply logic, it is not so much. Crying is the only tool a baby has to let us know that he needs something, it is his key. In order for the key to serve something, it needs a lock where it can fit perfectly, and that lock we have adults to feel, with crying, that discomfort that causes us to do something to calm the cry.
That key and our lock are the key to babies' survival. If the key did not fit the lock, or if we insisted on modifying the lock, so that the key could not open (we), we would be disturbing the normal development of the owners of the key. Come on, if we become insensitive to crying, how many "professionals" try to get or how many fathers and mothers behave because they believe it is the best, we will be Failing to meet the basic needs of a baby that he suffers, and much, and that he desperately tries to open the only door he knows with the only key he has.
Imagine that you are the key, fleeing from despair, knowing that the only thing that can save you from anxiety and suffering is to open the door of your house as soon as possible, enter and close it behind your back. You arrive at the door, with the key in your hand for some time, ready to make the expert and fast turn that you dominate so much by the custom, and at the moment of putting the key you see that it does not enter. You can't Someone has changed the lock. But you need to enter now, as soon as possible. You knock on the door, but nobody does anything on the other side.
The crying is like that, it is sharp and it is annoying because that way we jump quickly to silence it. And this happens in women, it happens in men, and it happens when adults have children and also when they don't have them.
In the words of Sokol Chang, one of the authors of the study:
Our species has been designed so that it is not only the mother who takes care of the offspring; That's why we all respond to your crying.
So the next time someone says "let him cry" or "children should learn to sleep alone by leaving a certain time alone in the room", you already have an answer to add to "I would never do that to a child" : I would never do that to a child, and they say that the cry of a baby is the most unbearable noise that exists, precisely so that we pay attention to the baby and silence him.
