Good Baby, Bad Baby

There is one question that I hate above all others. It makes me so irritated I have to grit my teeth and dig my fingers into my palms to maintain my composure when I hear it. An angry flush rises on my cheeks, and my heart pounds in anger and frustration. It’s a question that I would wager every new mother or father will hear sometime in their baby’s first month of life. And it is this:

“Is he/she a good baby?”

Arrrrgh! Seriously. It makes me want to scream. Because I know that this question is always asked by well-meaning, thoughtful people who genuinely want to express concern for how parents are coping with a new baby in the house.

But, REALLY! What’s a person supposed to say? It’s all well and good if the baby in question started sleeping through the night at the age of two weeks, and if he takes two-hour naps three times a day. Or if the baby only cries when hungry, and can entertain herself for hours playing with her own fingers. Or if he figured out how to latch on and nurse without causing his mother any pain/frustration in the process. Then the parent can smile sweetly at the question, eyes bright with hours of blissful rest, and reply that their baby is, indeed, a perfectly cherubic angel.

But what if the baby in question is like our firstborn? A baby who had trouble nursing for weeks, leaving both of us in tears more often than not. And then, once he’d figured out nursing, pretty much wanted to do so 20 hours out of the day. A baby who had colic for three months, obliging my husband and me to take turns every evening walking him up and down our sidewalk because that was the only way to get him to stop crying. A baby who woke up at least every three hours for the first six months of his life and didn’t sleep through the night until he was almost two.

Do those little foibles mean he was a BAD baby? Is that what I was supposed to answer? “Thank you so much for asking, but no. In fact, he isn’t a good baby at all. But I appreciate your concern.”

The thing is, whether a baby is easy or more of a challenge, all babies are consummate professionals at being babies. Their job description is simple, yet life-or-death important: to have their needs met, so that they can grow. And the only way to go about this is by making sure that their providers don’t forget to provide. So they communicate those needs as best they can, and most do so by crying. A lot. Fortunately, God had the forethought to make their cries agonizing for us to hear and their faces adorable for us to see, so that physically and emotionally fatigued parents wouldn’t just leave them in a ditch somewhere.

I’m genuinely happy for parents whose babies were born innately satisfied with life, and who are easy to care for. But some babies simply don’t have it within themselves to be able to self-soothe, and for some, sleeping and eating are just more of a challenge. Dr. William Sears, well-known pediatrician and hero of the Attachment Parenting movement, prefers the term “high need babies,” which I personally find helpful. These babies aren’t bad, they just need a little (okay, an exhausting amount of) extra attention. He recommends, among other things, baby wearing, which means using a sling or other baby carrier to hold the infant next to the parents’ body. This provides the physical closeness and comfort babies need, while leaving the parent’s hands free so they can actually do a load of laundry at some point. This really does work, as the boom in baby-wearing products can attest.

As the parent of a high need baby, I was always reassured by the survival stories of other parents who also had demanding infants. And having survived those difficult years, I do my best to be supportive of new parents by never, ever describing any baby as “good,” because where does the inverse of that take us? In lieu of that adjective, I instead offer the terms “easy,” “contented,” “low-maintenance.” And if I want to ask how new parents are coping, I take a different approach: I assume the worst (example: “So, are you getting any sleep at all?” spoken in my most compassionate voice), and then express my great pleasure for them if, in fact, their baby does sleep more than two hours at a time. Or, if they were blessed with a baby like our firstborn, I offer heart-felt sympathy and understanding, and often, some food and a gift certificate to the local video store. Because they won’t be going out for dinner and a movie anytime soon.