What Makes a Difficult Baby?

We all label some babies as "difficult" and some as "easy". I didn't think twice about describing my tiny daughter as difficult. I was all too aware of how she failed to measure up to my previous expectations of babies: she would not sleep without me lying beside her; she almost always woke when I tried to put her down asleep; she would not lie in a bouncy chair; she cried whenever she was not feeding, in a carrier or in a pram; she fed hourly through the night.

If I knew then what I know now I would have put her in a sling from the moment I woke up to the moment we went to bed and I would not have hesitated to co-sleep with her from the day she was born. But, back then, I took some solace in the fact that things were so very hard because I had a particularly demanding baby to care for.

As Cave Baby has grown up and I have talked to more and more mums about their "difficult" babies I have come to realise how little I valued her "good" traits. I was so preoccupied with her sleeping problems that I never realised how fortunate I was that she breastfed well from the very first attempt; that I never suffered particularly sore nipples; that she kept her milk down and brought burps up easily; that she could lie beside me all night without ever needing to be winded; that she fell asleep when the lights went out without fail, and was content to lie in bed with me until late in the morning. Even if she had been the best sleeper in the world, I would probably have still called her "difficult" if she come up short in some other department.

Reading Our Babies, Ourselves by Meredith Small has given me a different perspective on difficult babies. I now realise that "difficulty" is always relative to the culture in which the baby lives. If I had been part of a culture that customarily co-slept and carried its young then Cave Baby's "difficulties" would not even have shown up. Perhaps in such a culture it would be the babies who fidgeted excessively in a sling, or who wriggled at night, that would be considered "difficult".

And there is another side of "difficulty". My baby's reuctance to sleep alone and her insistence on human contact were simply her ways of telling me what she needed to grow and thrive. All babies know what is good for them, but the "difficult" ones are just a bit more determined to get it. There is an interesting anecdote about this in Meredith Small's book. In the 1970s a researcher named Marten de Vries followed some Masai infants and identified the ten "easiest" and the ten "most difficult". When he returned three months later, only thirteen of thh babies were left, the rest having moved on. Over the next three months of famine, seven of these babies died: six "easy" babies and only one "difficult" baby. Perhaps it was their "difficulty", their determination to have their needs met, that helped the "difficult" babies to stay alive.

I will share a couple more bits from Our Babies, Ourselves but in the meantime you might like to read Hobo Mama's review of it.