It's one of the toughest jobs in parenting - soothing a crying baby. Tougher still in public, when desperately singing Disney songs and jiggling up and down are frankly embarrassing. An inconsolable baby can make you feel and look like the most useless parent in the world. And it's a worldwide phenomenon, at least in places like Finland, Denmark and the US, where surveys show between 12 and 20 per cent of parents take their screaming infants to their doctors for help.
If soothing a crying baby is an intuitive response, you'd expect it to be the right one to at least partly relieve the baby's distress. My generation of mothers is fabulously snooty about our grandparents who left their babies exercising their lungs at the bottom of the garden. 'Well that was the fashion then,' we smirk knowingly, 'They didn't mean to be so heartless and callous.' But fashions have an irritating way of coming round again - including those in child rearing. New research on soothing babies from the US suggests that maybe the old way of dealing with tearful infants had some basis in science.
Two research papers published in the current edition of the US journal Child Development look at the effects of a group of middle class mothers (the researchers say they are easier to get hold of than fathers but would expect results to be the same) soothing their babies in a doctor's surgery. The first looks at the effects after vaccination, the second at occasions in which the babies were upset in the doctor's surgery, in response to 'everyday events' such as being hungry or needing their nappy changed.
The second study was done to avoid the criticism that jabbing a needle into a baby may not be easily extrapolated to everyday distress. Arguably just being in a doctor's surgery should make any baby with sense cry.
The maternal soothing of the 55 babies (aged between two and six months) in the study was captured on video. Seeing their soothing techniques detailed seems unnatural - the idea that such personal behaviour can be classified - but documented behaviours included face to face contact, swaying or rocking, kissing, feeding, soothing speech, distraction with an object, and from the stricter mothers, expressions of disgust.
According to the researchers none of it worked. They had observers grade the infants' behavioural responses including the time taken by the infants to quieten, and they measured levels of cortisol, a hormone raised in stress. The studies found that more maternal soothing was associated with the babies crying for longer periods, and that it didn't reduce levels of cortisol.
This suggests, say the authors, that the infant's temperament may be the overriding factor - fussy babies may demand more attention from their mothers but may not necessarily be consoled by them.
The findings rather contradict previous behavioural work in the 1970s that said rapidly responding to distressed babies reduced the amount they cried at the age of one. More recent work has found that delaying the response may reduce the frequency of crying bouts in first six months.
However, another study of 99 mothers and babies, published in the US journal Pediatrics, found that three-month-old babies who were carried around a lot cried and fussed over 40 per cent less than other infants who were carried less.
Since I have a four-month-old girl (they cry less than boys) on whom I use face to face contact and kissing to soothe her teething, I ask the author of the papers in Child Development what he thinks his study means. Dr Michael Lewis, a psychologist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, groans when I ask if it's a waste of time comforting a baby.
His hypothesis is that in developed countries most of us don't need to worry about our baby being fed or eaten by wild animals, so our protection of them focuses on preventing them being stressed. Parental soothing may generally produce happy children who, when they are stressed, are better able to cope with it. Long-term 'if you do go and comfort your baby, what it may mean is that they grow up realising you are around for them,' adds Lewis soothingly.
Only when you measure parental soothing very closely do you realise it doesn't have a demonstrable effect on acute distress, and that may be because levels of soothing are generally high already. It's analogous to most of us not needing extra vitamin C because we get enough fruit and vegetables.
I suggest he's saying this to avoid accusations that he's anti-soothing. Not at all, he says. The study should actually reassure parents who find it hard to soothe their babies. About 15 per cent of babies are not easily soothed and it's good for parents not to feel guilty about it - to realise their baby's response to stress is nothing personal.
Parents who can't soothe their babies can feel utterly helpless, they may hit their infants and are at higher risk of post-natal depression. They may also use dangerous methods to stop them crying - lying them front-down to sleep (increasing their risk of cot death) - or misguidedly try to shake them out of it.
In addition, some babies are just difficult. Once irritated they take a long time to calm down. Infants have temperaments in their own right, and how they handle may not reflect either their parents' confidence or personality.
My daughter's temperament is generally easy-going and sunny, which is nothing to do with me at all. But when she cries, as all babies do, I will continue to soothe her. If only because it makes me feel better.
