How one mom learned to translate baby cries

Your infant is crying and you don’t know why. Every day, parents struggle unsuccessfully to understand why their children act the way they do. In her book, “Child Sense,” child development expert Priscilla J. Dunstan breaks down those barriers by explaining how to decode your baby’s crying. In this excerpt, she writes about how she learned the language.

Chapter one: Discovering the key to the sense types
During the months of pregnancy, many of us fantasized about the bond we would soon have with our child. We imagined cooing to each other, holding each other close in a bubble of mutual wonder, fascination, and intimacy. Even before our baby is born, we are able to bring to life a deep love for that child. Yet after the child does finally arrive and is in our arms for the first time, this lovely imaginary bubble often bursts all too soon. We find ourselves faced with the seemingly incomprehensible cries and needs of a baby we have difficulty soothing, and sometimes with something even more disturbing: a feeling of complete incompetence about our ability to take care of this new life we have brought into the world.

I know this feeling of uncertainty intimately. Before I became a mother, I imagined that blissful state with my soon-to-be-born son. At the time, my partner and I had moved out into the countryside on a piece of land with hills, horses, and a great expanse of sky. We had dreamed about having an idyllic life close to nature, where we would raise our child free of the stresses of the city or suburbia. But life after Tom's arrival was quite different from what I'd imagined. My country refuge began to seem like a trap. With Tom's father both working a lot and traveling overseas regularly, I found myself quite isolated and alone. My baby cried incessantly, and instead of feeling blissful, I went through months of muddled bewilderment, frustration, and self-doubt. I tried to soothe Tom by rocking him, nursing him, and taking him for walks. He would cry some more, and I would give him a warm bath or sing to him. Once I even tried doing some simple yoga movements while holding him, hoping that the rhythms of my motion and my breathing would calm him. Nothing I did seemed to work, and I was growing more and more upset — almost frightened.

Unbeknownst to me, Tom was in a constant and intense state of physical agitation due to colic, which was the reason behind the long periods of nonstop crying and his inability to respond to soothing. Compounding my misery over my inconsolable baby was my own suffering from horrible migraines, which often left me visually impaired. There were times during this stressful period when I literally could not see my baby. Day by day, my confidence in my ability to take care of my child dwindled, leaving me unsure of what to do and truly worried about whether I was up to the enormous job of motherhood. However, it was thanks to my migraines that I stumbled across a partial solution to Tom's distress. When I had the migraines there were times when I couldn't eat anything, with the unexpected result that Tom's issues with gas and intestinal discomfort actually lessened. This led me in a roundabout way to the discovery that what I ate had a big effect on my baby. When I began looking at my eating habits I realized that dairy products were the staples of my diet, and that the cheese and yogurt I liked so much were making Tom sick. It turned out that Tom was suffering from colic and reflux, greatly aggravated by his allergic reaction to the lactose in my breast milk from any kind of dairy I had ingested.

But my diet was just part of the problem. When I stopped eating dairy, Tom's reflux did decrease dramatically, but he was still very fussy, unable to stay asleep for long, and unresponsive to any of the calming tactics I tried during his long bouts of crying. The next stage in my journey to discovering how to help my child began with a strength that I never dreamed would come to my rescue as a parent: my ability to listen.

Video   How to better understand your child Nov. 4: Behavior specialist Priscilla Dunstan, author of “Child Sense,” shares advice on ways to understand your child’s senses to better communicate with them. Today show

My acute sense of hearing is in part due to my very early exposure to music. My mother started my musical training before I was even born, by playing classical music while I was still in her womb. Then, as soon as I was physically able, she introduced me to the violin, using the Suzuki method. Since I couldn't read music at the age of three and four, my mother would play something for me and I would play it back from memory. Because of this ability, I was labeled as having an eidetic memory, which means that my sense of hearing is so precise that I can remember any sound or piece of music with great accuracy after hearing it only one time. Related to this ability to memorize music is an even stronger ability to recognize patterns. My skill and ease with music and pattern recognition led to my early career as a professional violinist and later as an opera singer. (Indeed, music is just that: a pattern created by the arrangement of musical notes.) My ability to pick up on sound patterns was also what eventually led to my discovery of a universal baby language.

Blinded by migraines and worried about my ability to be able to respond to Tom's needs when I could barely see him, I began to listen to his cries with such acuteness that I eventually discerned that certain sounds were repeated time and again. Gradually I realized that each of these sounds had a precise meaning that expressed a different need. The first distinct sound I recognized within a cry was "neh," the sound associated with hunger; it actually made my breasts leak. Through trial and error, I identified a second cry, which sounded like "eairh," and seemed to indicate lower gas pain. A third cry, "owh," meant he was sleepy. I eventually isolated five distinct sounds, each of which expressed a different physical sensation and need: hunger, sleepiness, discomfort, gas, and a need to be burped. Once I understood the meaning behind his different cries, I happily fed him, burped him, held him, and helped him to sleep, essentially meeting all of his most urgent needs. Often I was even able to anticipate what Tom needed, thereby avoiding the crying altogether.

To make a long story short, over time I began to realize that babies everywhere made the same sounds that Tom made to signal the same needs. I'd be in a park and see a young mother looking miserable as she tried futilely to stop her child from crying. Based on my experience with Tom, I'd venture a guess about what the baby wanted. Lo and behold, the baby would calm down, and the mother would look at me as if I was a miracle worker. And it didn't matter what the ethnic group of the mother and baby was. The cries always seemed to be the same, across all cultures. I felt I was on to something that could help all mothers. As it turned out, I seemed to have stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone of baby language.

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The language of babies
Having discovered what I believed to be a universal baby language, common to babies all over the world, I wanted to share it. As the daughter of a scientifically rigorous child psychologist, I knew that if I wanted to make the case for the existence of this language so that I could bring it into the public eye and help other struggling mothers, I would need to produce a body of evidence that met exacting research standards. So under the guidance of my father, Max Dunstan, a renowned Australian psychologist who until his retirement was the director of the Educational Testing Center at the University of New South Wales and a specialist in testing and educational protocol, I began what turned out to be an eleven-year period of research. During this time I opened an office in Sydney and began working one-on-one with families (mostly mothers and their babies), collecting data for my emerging research project. (Later on, I would expand this office into a full-fledged clinical research center.)

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