Parenting Tip: What to say when your baby is crying

We wanted to talk about what to say when your baby gets hurt or gets scared or is tired when they're crying. It's a lot of our instinct to swoop our baby up and say, “you're okay”, because we need them to be okay. We need to believe they're okay, that they're not hurt, and they're going to survive this one. And they are.

But the problem is your baby has one way of communicating with you, and that's by crying to tell you that they're not okay. And then if you meet them with, “You are okay”, there's a dissonance.

There's dissonance there because they're saying, “I'm not okay. I'm crying. I'm hurt or I'm scared”. And you're saying, “oh no, no, no, you're okay.”

So either they feel like, “whoa, she's not getting it, that I'm really not okay.” So they cry harder or they learn it's not okay to cry. And then they push those feelings down, and going to pretend they’re fine even when they’re not.

An alternative way of handling it is just to say exactly what you saw. “You were sitting here and then you fell backward and you bonked your little head”. Or, “that truck was loud. That must have really scared you. I see you're crying.”

So the idea is to just tell them with empathy what you think the reason for their crying is and not try to put a judgment on it of “you're okay. You don't need to cry anymore. You're all done with that.”

The idea being that you're a witness to your baby, not a judge.