So in the weeks before a baby is born they have a sleep wake cycle & manage to go to sleep by themselves. However once they are born their parents have to get up in the night to soothe them. Now I realise that in the womb a baby has constant ‘food’ on tap & once they are born they get hungry & need feeding, but why do they need their parents to be awake with them even when all their physical needs are met?
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Nature is really simple sometimes.
Babies who cried from *any* discomfort, who *also* had parents who reliably responded to these cries and tried to resolve the source of discomfort, tended to live longer than babies who didn’t always cry, or whose parents didn’t consistently respond.
Thus emerged fussy babies and eternally suffering parents.
The simple answer is that to a newborn, everything is new and new is scary. When a baby is born, they are starting from basically a completely blank slate mentally. They have some in built reflexes to know that people around them are comforting, but when no one is around it is scary. Add those together and there natural reaction is to cry to get someones attention when they are uncomfortable.
When it comes to sleep, they want someone nearby to keep them calm until they are asleep. Eventually, they learn that they are safe even when their parents are in there immediate presence, but that takes some time.
This isn’t the full answer but I may have a piece to the puzzle. Babies hear a constant whooshing sound in the womb, it being their mothers pulse. As they are growing in the womb this becomes very comforting. Then one day it’s gone. And it’s cold. And bright. WTF? The “shhhh” sound parents make soothes their babies because it sounds like the mothers pulse in the womb.
> manage to go to sleep by themselves.
not always. plenty of pregnant women have been tormented by their baby being overly active.
Ahahaha.
You haven’t yet had the pleasure of being pregnant, I see. The baby does not have a sleep wake cycle, unless you mean that it sleeps when it likes and wakes when it likes. You woke your mother up by attempting the tango at 3am when you were inside her. So did my son. So do babies generally.
Once the child is born, the parents try to get it into some sort of pattern just so they can function and the baby can get enough sleep. It’s not innate or automatic. Sleeping patterns of behaviour are learned.
Currently 8 months pregnant, already mother of 2. They do not have a sleep/wake cycle. It doesn’t exist. Anytime I lie down to rest the kid starts to attempt punching it’s way out alien-style. Generally they are rather quiet when you move around a lot, both from the movement of the mother effectively restricting their own, and probably the movement itself calming them down. The second outside things are quiet they start their own fun.
Being held close to the caregivers body is a physical need of a newborn. So if you put them down somewhere because it’s not comfortable to sleep with a baby strapped to you, their physical needs are not being met. Some babies are calmer than others and have higher frustration tolerance levels. Some, well, don’t.
They need to learn that the world doesn’t end when they are not being held constantly, and that’s a process that in some babies takes more than just a few months.
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