I Swear, He’s Manipulating Me

Everyone’s heard it. Everyone, at some point, has probably thought it. After the fifteenth time you lower him – ever so carefully – to the crib and his eyes pop open and well up, “He’s doing this on purpose”.

He’s not, I promise you that, but at three in the morning it feels like the only explanation. He waited until you closed your eyes, he stops the instant you pick him up, and .. yeah. Manipulation requires a whole brain thing that doesn’t exist yet, though. It’s planning, an understanding of not only your own wants and needs but a whole other person’s and how to get what you want over what they want. The first deliberate lies show up somewhere between two- and three-years old, (Though, I mean, I asked my baby twice if he had pooped and he looked me dead in the eye and said no when there was definitely poop in that diap’ – YMMV). (He wasn’t lying, No is the only response to a question he knows). 

But I digress.

A six-week-old crying when you set him down is not executing a strategy. He has a nervous system that regulates through contact and comes apart without it, the way yours would if you were dropped into a dark room the size of a stadium after nine months of being held on every side at once. The cry that stops the moment you pick him up is not the tell of a con man who got what he wanted. It’s just “ah, that’s better” when what he needed was you.

Not gonna lie, it does seem like these little buddies are out to make sure you do not sleep and your life is as difficult as possible. They cry as soon as you get the fork to your lips, they refuse the bottle from your partner, they sleep (like a baby???) soundly in your arms until you dare to sit. 

It’s not calculated, it’s a lot more logical than that: he wakes when the surface beneath him changes temperature and pressure. Witching Hour is a tired body at the end of the day taking in more information than it can process. He’s most comfortable with the person he spent 100% of his time with before he landed in this big open world. 

I’m not going to sit here and claim having this makes it easier, because Great Aunt Brenda is still popping off about how you’ll spoil him, that responding to cries somehow rewards and trains them to do more, that they’re seeing how much they can ‘get out of you’. 

That advice comes from 1920s behaviourism, btw, from people who told parents not to pick up a crying baby lest they raise a clingy one, and it was never backed by anything. When somebody eventually went and looked: the babies whose cries got answered promptly in the early months cried less later and ended up more independent, not less. 

What your baby is doing when he calls for you is the only thing he knows how to do: asking, “Keep me alive, Big Person. Don’t leave me here, plskthx.” 

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