The Fussy Baby Book: Parenting your high-need child from birth to five. Martha Sears

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       chapter 1

       hayden – our high-need child

      Sitting in the high school auditorium one spring evening, we proudly watched our seventeen-year-old daughter, Hayden, take her bows following the school’s production of Oklahoma! She’d played the role of Ado Annie wonderfully, yet it was the Hayden we saw after the curtain call who warmed our hearts the most.

      We watched how she cared for her friends – the eye contact, the hugs, the delightfully natural social gestures, and the expressivity that drew people, magnet-like, into her presence. As a tear or two flowed down her dad’s cheeks, we thought back to “Hayden the handful” – the demanding baby, the strong-minded toddler, the challenging preschooler, the full-of-energy grade-schooler, and the exhausting teen. Now we are seeing a dynamic adult beginning to emerge. How the three of us got through those years and to this point in our lives inspired this book. Here’s the story of the baby we got and the lessons we learned.

how she acted

      Hayden stretched us as parents and as individuals. Our first three children were relatively “easy” infants. They slept well and had a predictable feeding routine. Their needs were easy to identify – and satisfy. In fact, I began to suspect that parents in my paediatric practice who complained about their fussy babies were exaggerating. “What’s all the fuss about difficult babies?” I wondered.

      Then came Hayden, our fourth, whose birth changed our lives. Our first clue that she was going to be different came within a day or two. “I can’t put her down”, became Martha’s recurrent theme. Breast-feeding for Hayden was not only a source of food, but also a constant source of comfort. Martha became a human pacifier.

      Hayden would not accept substitutes. She was constantly in arms and at her mother’s breast – and after a while those arms and breasts would get tired. Hayden’s cries were not mere complaints, they were all-out alarms. Well-meaning friends suggested, “Just put her down and let her cry it out.” That didn’t work at all. Her extraordinary persistence kept her crying. Her cries did not fade away. They intensified if we didn’t respond.

      Hayden was very good at teaching us what she needed. “As long as we hold her, she’s content” became our baby-care slogan. If we tried letting her fuss, she only fussed harder. We played “pass the baby”. When Martha’s arms gave out, into mine Hayden came. We used a front-pack carrier we had saved from brother Peter’s baby days, but Hayden liked it only when we were out walking.

      Nights were not bad in the early months, considering how intense she was by day. But around six months that all changed, and her nights became high-need. She rejected her cot as if it were a cage. After fourteen hours of baby holding, we longed for some nighttime relief. Hayden had other plans. As soon as we put her down in her cot and tried to creep out of the bedroom, she would awaken, howling in protest at having been left alone. Martha would nurse her back to sleep in the rocking chair, then put her back into her cot, and after an hour or less she would awaken again, demanding a repeat of the rocking-chair-and-nursing routine. It soon became evident that Hayden’s need for human contact was as high СКАЧАТЬ