As parents and caregivers, we have perhaps no greater challenge than trying to understand what it is our kids need from us. Getting to know our children in each phase of their development involves observing and translating what we see and hear into our best approximations of their experiences. In each developmental stage we learn new idioms of the evolving language of behavior and words that our children use to communicate their needs. With many missteps and bruises along the way, we become better at interpreting and responding to those needs.

        Infancy introduces a dance between parent and child -- both partners simultaneously acting and reacting, teaching and learning -- that continues over the life of the relationship. There is perhaps no more uncertain phase of parenting than infancy. Without a common language, each partner is learning the most fundamental of steps. For parents, instruction manuals and advice from family, friends, and pediatricians can never completely decode the full range of their baby's highly individualized set of shifting signals and cues.

        The earliest pattern of interactions between caregiver and baby provides a foundation for understanding the earliest experiences of distress and fear. It is our job to deal with our babies' distress in ways they can internalize and increasingly rely upon in our absence.

        For infants and caregivers, the most prevalent forms of distress are located and communicated via the body. Before we can talk about the subjective fears of childhood, we need to understand the earliest basis for the experience of distress and the ways parents and infants deal with it.

Building Blocks

        In the earliest period of development, biological processes are central in establishing a baby's rudimentary sense of self as distinct from other. This is built on sensations that contribute to an internal psychological "self " that both experiences the body and guides its actions. For example, the mouth plays a leading role in shaping the baby's earliest self-images in the context of the world. The mouth is not only crucial in its role of eating to sustain life but also in activities such as sucking, licking, and biting. It is also a central organ of perceiving, regulating, and altering sensations.

        In the absence of hunger, the baby mouths fingers, toes, toys, pacifiers, and the mother's breast. This instinctual mouthing and sucking is a way to self-soothe; it decreases tension and distress and is one way the baby begins to explore the outside world. Similarly, through crying when uncomfortable or making high-pitched squeals to attract the mother's attention, the baby learns about the mouth's power to communicate.

        While central, the mouth is not the only source of pleasure and self-soothing. A broader range of inborn processes involving sight, hearing, reflexes, muscle tone, and more also influence the infant's earliest experience of the body and the emergence of a self. Variations in sleep and wake cycles, quiet and alert periods, gazing into the caregiver's face, and patterns of withdrawal from or responsiveness to comforting also play a central role in the baby's development of a sense of the world outside.

        From the beginning of life, parents' and caregivers' interactions help to organize and shape the ways in which a baby expresses needs. The mother or primary caregiver's involvement and intimate contact with the infant's body -- feeding, cleaning, holding, cooing -- are basic and essential ingredients of this earliest relationship, this "primary attachment." Their enormous investment in and attention to the baby's most basic bodily needs sensitizes parents to the ways that they can diminish the baby's discomfort.

        These feelings are all the more burdensome when parents feel deprived by the baby of the earliest experiences of reciprocal love. After hours of trying to relieve the baby's discomfort -- walking, rocking, stroking, trying new formulas -- parents may resent a baby who doesn't offer the rewards of contentment, pleasure, and peace. The associated frustration and anger we may feel toward the baby at these times can make us feel especially guilty and uncomfortable.

        It is hard to admit that we can hate someone we love, that they are driving us crazy. Brace yourselves, because you will experience similar levels of frustration and rage with your children at many different points in their lives. But it's particularly troublesome to have these feelings toward babies, those utterly dependent and vulnerable objects of our adoration.

        It is not uncommon for one parent to feel more defeated and perhaps angrier than the other. Particularly when we are feeling most stretched, there is a greater likelihood of feelings being displaced from baby to partner. It was always in the middle of the longest nights of our child's inconsolable discomfort that my wife and I would get most irritated with each other. Ah, those first few colic-ridden months! When our son's howling kept both of us awake, whoever wasn't holding or attempting to soothe the baby always had a better idea about how it should be done. Fortunately -- and not at three in the morning -- we realized that arguing robbed us of the support we needed from each other precisely at the time in our infant's life when the power of his biology outmatched the power and effectiveness of our efforts to relieve his discomfort. When we realized how limited our control was (and with frequent reminders to each other that colic would not last forever), my wife and I were much better able to comfort each other. Our distress and fatigue did not disappear until our son's colic did. However, we stopped directing each other's comforting efforts and stopped displacing our angst when these efforts inevitably failed.

        In the midst of these difficult early months, it is easy to imagine that the parent-child relationship is headed down a rocky road. But colic does abate, babies eventually startle less easily, and sudden noises don't distress them forever. And parents learn from experience to offset these early obstacles. It is often only after things have smoothed out and parents are able to experience their baby's comforted responses that they begin to believe both in their own effectiveness and in a shared and deepening bond with their child.

        It will be a hard-won but important achievement when, at each phase of development, you are able to recognize the limits of your controls and appreciate that differing temperaments, qualities, and characteristics are powerful influences on our children's strengths and vulnerabilities -- as powerful as our efforts to help and guide them along the way.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Marans
Excerpted from the book Listening to Fear: Helping Kids Cope, from Nightmares to the Nightly News by Steven Marans, Ph.D. Copyright © 2005 Steven Marans. (Published by Owl Books; January 2005; $15.00US/$20.95CAN; 0-8050-7604-2)

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