If your baby’s whining leaves you puzzled as to what’s wrong, just give it time. Deciphering a baby’s cries depends on experience, new research suggests.
Being able to tell if a baby is in pain is vital information for new parents and caregivers. But rather than being an innate ability that adults can rely on, understanding the difference between screams of pain and mild discomfort comes with experience.
“We found that adults can recognize signals of pain rather than mild discomfort in babies’ cries, but this ability requires prior experience,” said the study’s lead author, Siloé Corvin.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that parents of young children are much better at decoding babies’ cries than adults with little or no childcare experience.
While this may not seem surprising, the researchers also found that today’s parents could tell the difference between cries of pain and distress from babies they had never heard before. Inexperienced people were unable to do so, the researchers reported.
More than 200 participants with varying levels of childcare experience were given eight recordings of a crying baby that they listened to over two days. They then had to distinguish between the cries of pain induced by a vaccination and the cries of discomfort recorded at bath time.
How well they performed depended largely on prior and current exposure to infants. While inexperienced adults did no better than chance, parents and child care professionals who interacted frequently with infants got it right 70% of the time.
The study is part of a larger research program looking at how information is encoded and communicated in babies’ cries.
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“Babies need to express their pain or discomfort through cries and vocalizations,” Corvin said. “There are other ways to tell if a baby is in pain, for example by their facial expressions or their posture, but crying can give us additional information about how the baby is feeling.”
According to the authors, the ability to decipher babies’ cries is likely to develop from the neurobiological changes that come with parenthood and infant care.
“The ability to distinguish between pain and discomfort comes quickly; it starts in the first few hours of a baby’s life,” Corvin said. “By the time the baby is two to three months old, most parents know what the different cries mean.”
But you don’t have to be a parent to learn to decode babies’ cries, Corvin said, adding, “Any exposure to babies — babysitting, babysitting, even listening to recordings — can help tune the ear to the different acoustics .patterns of their cries”.