My Son Will Thank me When he Realizes Why He’s not a Whiner

Sometimes when you get an answer that seems crazy, it’s because you asked the wrong question.

We are continuing to undo the damage we did by letting our son use a bottle during his first week of life. We are getting breastfeeding coaching, and things are improving. But today we learned something disturbing: breastfeeding experts don’t like pacifiers. We were advised to stop giving them to our son.

This is more than an inconvenience. It’s a direct threat to our sanity.

When we were at the hospital after delivery, the nurses let us use pacifiers, and it was very helpful, because it temporarily shut down one of the most horrible noises known to humanity. Since then, we have relied on our little rubber friends with great enthusiasm. I have probably shoved pacifiers in my son’s mouth at least 25 times a day. That’s just me, not the wife.

I should get more of them and shove them in my ears.

Sometimes he will be quiet for hours. Other times, a pacifier will only buy maybe 20 seconds of relief. My son is like a slot machine. You put the pacifier in, and you see what you get. Even if the silence is short, it’s worth the effort, because crying babies are worse than leaf blowers.

My wife claims the noise doesn’t bother her, but when my son is loud and close to me, I literally feel like my brain is shaking inside my skull, like a crystal goblet about to shatter from an opera singer’s high note. It even makes my eyeballs hurt. And he can scream loud enough to damage hearing permanently. It makes me wonder why babies don’t all go deaf their first year.

I don’t think my wife is totally honest with herself about the crying, because every so often, she admits she has had it. So if it doesn’t bother her, why is she tired of it?

It’s unfashionable to admit your baby is annoying, just like it’s unfashionable to say you wear nitrile gloves when changing his diapers. You’re supposed to enjoy your baby’s howls, and you’re supposed to think their poop is just like peanut butter.

I don’t know why we persist in lying to ourselves about these things, but we do. It’s like the lies people tell about childbirth being beautiful. If childbirth is beautiful, watching a surgeon do a liver transplant on a conscious patient must be gorgeous.

No one actually thinks childbirth is beautiful. It’s disgusting, degrading beyond description, dirty, and unbelievably painful. If we could somehow make terrorists give birth on command, we would have used it instead of waterboarding.

Actually, we wouldn’t, because childbirth kills people and waterboarding doesn’t.

Our method of childbirth is a curse. It’s not supposed to be beautiful. It’s an extreme form of punishment. See Genesis 3. It’s okay to be honest about it. God didn’t tell Eve that because she had listened to Satan, he was going to give her something beautiful. He gave her a small opening and babies with enormous heads, unlike any creatures in the animal kingdom. He gave her monthly torments that modern women go through 13 times a year for over 40 years. It’s not beautiful. Stop conning yourself.

If childbirth is so beautiful, why is it that women pay other women to have their babies, but no woman has ever paid to have another woman’s baby?

So anyway, I am now faced with a future without pacifiers, and it is illegal to put a baby in a soundproof bag. Things look bleak. He is very peaceful when he’s full of milk directly from the source, but it may be a few days before he is getting it that way all the time.

It’s worse for my wife, because she still feels a compulsion to pick our son up when he squawls. When she’s tired enough, she lets him wail, but she gets mad when she sees me in a comfy chair and my son a few feet away on the floor hollering bloody murder. When she’s alone with him, she carries or holds him in a chair for hours.

I have been getting into arguments about the crying issue. I keep saying babies get spoiled when you pick them up as soon as they start crying, and my opponents tell me I’m heartless and that my son will not love me when he grows up. Okay, only one person actually said that.

I have been Googling about crying babies, and to my dismay, I keep seeing “experts” saying you can’t spoil a baby by holding it too much. Today, I realized I was seeing this wrongheaded tripe because I was asking the wrong question. The correct question is, “Will it harm a baby to let it cry?”

The same self-anointed gurus generally admit that letting a baby cry won’t hurt it. They probably hate admitting this, but I can see why they tell the truth. They depend on having people ask them for advice, and if they kept telling people there was no way to get relief from months of constant screeching, no one would look at their websites or buy their books, and they might occasionally be beaten by haggard parents with blisters on their eardrums.

You can definitely spoil a very young baby. I know this because we spoiled our newborn son in about a day by teaching him that artificial nipples were better than real ones. If a newborn can learn one thing, he can learn others. That’s just common sense.

“If scream, then hold,” is not quantum mechanics. Most lizards could learn it.

Even if you could not spoil a small baby, however, it would still be okay to put them down and let them howl sometimes, because it does them no harm, and it may prevent parents from jumping out of windows.

Let’s pretend you can’t teach a baby to cry constantly by picking it up too quickly. Even if that were true, it wouldn’t mean jumping up and grabbing crying babies in milliseconds was a good idea. They don’t actually need to be grabbed as soon as they start crying, and parents are human beings with limits. Parents have to have a certain amount of care. We have to eat, sleep, and rest. You can’t do any of those things if you’re carrying a baby 18 hours a day.

A baby needs parents who aren’t on the verge of collapsing, but it doesn’t need to be protected from an occasional solo screaming session in a bassinet behind a closed door.

Here’s another important thing to remember: babies cry for bad reasons.

Helicopter parents think that if a baby is crying, something must be wrong, and it needs to be addressed. That’s a fantasy. Babies cry when things are going perfectly. The diaper is dry, the belly is full, there has been plenty of sleep, the baby has been held and loved, the temperature is fine, the baby is not sick, but the hole is still open and the noise is still coming out. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing needs to be fixed, and if you shut the baby up anyway, you’ll probably have to do something detrimental in order to make it happen. You’ll have to overfeed him, cater to him too much, go without sleep, or do something else which is equally bad.

If you know the baby is fine, shut the door and go sit down for a while. This has worked ever since humanity has existed, and it will work now.

Right now, the heir to the throne is on a play mat about 6 feet away from me, yammering away like I shot his dog. There are no hunger signs. His diaper is very recent. His clothes are clean. Mom has probably held him for 10 of the last 18 hours. He has been breastfed for much of that time. Best guess: he is trying to poop.

I have read that some people solve the pooping-skills problem by shoving stuff up their kids’ rear ends. Supposedly this causes them to release and get relief.

Web sources say this is just a pacifier for the butt. It teaches babies to hold their poo until someone violates their no-fly zone(so to speak) with a hard object, and that’s a very bad habit.

I’m not doing it. I want to be able to look my son in the eye when he’s grown.

Mom just chickened out and held him for a few minutes, and of course, he shut up, although nothing else had changed. He got what he wanted. She’s getting better, though. She let him cry quite a while.

He is really cute, and we are crazy about him. I understand why it’s so hard for her to let him yell.

I asked her to add up all the hours she had spent holding him today, and she said, “Practically the whole day.” Not sustainable. Even if I had held him half the time, it would be too much for both of us, and I’m his dad, so I can’t give him the kind of time she can. I have other things to do.

We will win this battle eventually, if only because my wife will be physically unable to continue on two hours of sleep per night. I am not worried. We will get him off the pacifier and the bottle. He will not cry for hours on end, and we will not carry him constantly like an insulin pump.

He will become more independent, and we will be able to do things like mopping the floors and mowing the yard.

Looks like someone is hungry. I’m out.