Babies need to cry to exercise their lungs? Really?

I have just spent a whole hour Googling for research into this long-standing old-wives tale, and I have found nothing whatsoever to back it up. I did, however, find that this ‘advice’ is actually still being given, not just by ‘old wives’ but by actual books that are still in actual bookshops! I give you Parenting for Dummies. And I also found an article by a paediatric psychologist, no less, Dr Lynne Kenney, who says that not only does it exercise the lungs, but crying also helps babies to maintain their eye health!

Isn't this photograph beautiful!

I know what they say about assuming things, but I do believe that most of the people reading this blog do actually know that this little gem is a load of rubbish, but sometimes it’s nice to know why so we can tell any ‘old wives’ why we’re ignoring their advice, should they deign to impress it upon us.

There are always times in a Western baby’s life when it is better for her to be left to cry than not. In more natural cultures, babies arecarried all the time, and rarely cry. If mum isn’t available, or is too ill/tired/fed up to hold her baby, then there are always plenty of other adults around to share some of the work.

In our culture, however, we get too tired/fed up to hold our babies rather a lot sooner, simply because we are forced, by the way our society works, to parent in isolation. When it gets to the point that you are so angry you fear you may do something awful, then it is far safer for you to put your baby in another room and let her cry while you have five minutes to try to access what emotional reserves you can find. Or to call a friend to come and share the day with you.

In general, though, it appears that prolonged crying is actually very bad for babies. Actually, I’ll be more specific here. It’s prolonged, uncomforted distress that is bad for babies. Being left to do this over and over again can actually cause changes in their brains that can cause them to overreact to situations for the rest of their lives. Dr Margot Sunderland calls it an over-sensitive stress-response system in her book: What Every Parent Needs to Know.

Truby King

So, if it’s so bad for babies, what’s the history of the ‘it’s good for babies to cry’ myth? Well, I thought, initially, that it was the…ahem…delightful Dr Truby King (I refuse to apologise for linking to Wikipedia – sometimes the stuff’s good, and as long as you know that, like anything, it may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, then it’s actually quite a useful resource! Anyway, I digress…).

It turns out that he wasn’t the first person to posit this theory, and that it was probably Soranus of Ephesus , the Greek physician who, in the 2nd century AD suggested that crying was helpful exercise for the respiratory and digestive systems (9th para), but he did clarify that persistent crying could cause physical harm.

In 1908, a Dr Holt wrote, in his book The Care and Feeding of Children, that newborns should cry for at least 15-20 minutes every day to expand the lungs. Truby King’s advice came a few years after that. Neither of these writers ever produced any scientific evidence for their guidelines for parenting babies.

I think we can safely say those guidelines can be entirely disregarded and, as there actually is scientific evidence for the opposing idea of not letting babies cry any longer than we have to, it shouldn’t be too difficult to persuade any ‘old wives’ you come across that their advice is, well, ill-advised.