If the wails of your newborn baby leave you baffled as to what is wrong, just give it time. Deciphering a baby’s cries is all down to experience, new research suggests.
Being able to tell whether a baby is in pain is vital information for new parents and caregivers. But rather than being an innate skill adults can rely on, understanding the difference between cries of pain and mild discomfort comes with experience.
“We found that adults can recognise signals of pain as opposed to mild discomfort in babies’ cries, but that ability requires prior experience,” said the first author of the study, Siloé Corvin.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that parents with young children are much better at decoding babies’ cries than adults with little or no childcare experience.
While this may seem unsurprising, the researchers also found that current parents could tell between the cries of pain and discomfort of babies they had never heard before. Inexperienced individuals were unable to do so, the researchers reported.
Over 200 participants with different levels of childcare experience were given eight recordings of a baby crying which they listened to over two days. They then had to distinguish between the cries of pain induced by a vaccination and cries of discomfort recorded at bath time.
How well they performed depended heavily on prior and current exposure to babies. While inexperienced adults did no better than chance, parents and paediatric care professionals who interacted often with babies got it right 70% of the time.
The study is part of a broader research programme studying how information is encoded and communicated in babies’ cries.
“Babies have to express their pain or discomfort through cries and vocalisations,” said Corvin. “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.”
The ability to decipher babies’ cries is likely to develop from the neurobiological changes that come with parenthood and infant care, the authors say.
“The ability to distinguish between pain and discomfort comes quickly; it starts within the first few hours of a baby’s life,” said Corvin. “By the time the baby is two or three months old, most parents know what different cries mean.”
But you don’t have to be a parent to learn how to decode babies’ cries, said Corvin, adding: “Any exposure to babies – paediatric care, babysitting, and even listening to recordings – can help tune your ear to the different acoustic patterns of their cries.”
