Distress and Comfort

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The first serious question any new parent must deal with is “Why is the baby crying?” Judy Dunn takes this as a starting point, shows how experienced parents learn to answer it, and then moves on to a host of much less obvious, but no less fascinating, questions. For example: What is it about parents’ comforting behavior that actually soothes the child? Why do infants begin to show distress around strangers in the second half of their first year? Do the speed and quality of a mother’s response to her baby’s cries affect his intellectual or emotional development? Do individual differences in infant fretfulness prefigure later differences in character or intelligence? Will an infant be spoiled if his parents are too responsive to his crying?

Although the current state of psychological research does not permit final doctrine on any of these questions, Dunn offers sensible tentative answers that will prove interesting and useful to parents and child-care professionals who must decide many of the issues for themselves.