Baby Screaming Part 1 – Why Is It so Difficult to Stand it?

Posted in Balanced Parenting | June 1, 2008 | 2 Comments

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Occasionally I catch myself thinking, “Am I really a good mother or is there something that I could be doing better?” This happens mostly when I get irritated by my kids and no matter how much I love them sometimes I do feel that I cannot cope with them. I feel that I simply do not know what to do with them and I do not know how to calm them down. If you haven’t already guessed I am talking about the times when my babies start screaming and they continue to scream no matter what I do or how I try to entertain them.

I can’t say that my girls are too difficult (I am sure that some mothers face much bigger troubles with their kids than me), but there are two of them and that is exactly why it is so difficult to deal with them sometimes. Some days one of them will wake up and start crying which by now is no problem for me at all. I will take her in my arms and in just a few minutes will have her happy again. But there are those days when both my girls will decide to wake up screaming at the same time (its almost as if they have orchestrated this by themselves) and while I am trying to calm one of them down, another will continue screaming inconsolably. So this will result in constant ear piercing screams and constant irritation that makes me feel like my head is stuck inside of a drum at a rock concert.

 

I did a bit of research over the Internet about sound pressure levels and how they influence humans. It’s interesting to know that usually a baby scream equals about 115-130 decibels (for comparison, a voice in normal conversation is around 60 decibels, comfortable volume levels for a human ear are between 40 and 80 dB). Here is a chart showing how long a normal person should be exposed to different levels of volume on a daily basis in order to be healthy and well balanced both physically and emotionally. Note that daily exposure to sounds of 115 dB may pose serious health risks (hearing impairment, hypertension and annoyance). (According to the National Institute for Occupational Study and Health).

A baby scream can be identified as irritant type noise. It is difficult to find the best comparison of this noise with other noises that are classified and irritant noises but it is definitely something that is not pleasant for a normal person to listen to. There are no ways to measure noise but you can measure sound pressure that is produced by this noise. High sound pressures may lead to hearing loss if you are subjected to these sounds on a daily basis.

At first I could not understand how a single sound can damage your ear (I can’t think of a sound as something material – it’s not a hammer that can break your arm or leg and it’s not a knife that can cut your skin). I have decided to refresh my school anatomy knowledge about the ear and this is what I have found.

 

Each sound is actually a vibration in the air, quiet sounds can be compared to ripples on the water and loud sounds are more like tidal waves. These waves travel through the air and finally strike the eardrum which transmits the vibrations through a chain of ossicles (very tiny bones in the middle ear) to a fluid contained in a special snail-shaped tube, the cochlea. The walls of this tube are covered by minute hairs which continue to transmit the vibration. Low sounds (small waves) won’t travel far, while loud sounds will travel farther in the cochlea. The sound that we hear varies depending on which hairs vibrate. Very high sounds can damage the cochlea by damaging cochlea’s hair cells that respond to the sounds of that particular range and thereby reducing the ear’s ability to hear those frequencies in the future.

If your baby is not screaming enough to make you deaf (though being deaf might seem like a very good solution sometimes), then I am sure you will be pretty annoyed by this noise. Constant annoyance may result in permanent stress, depression, sleep disorders and cardiovascular problems.

This information does not mean that you can not spend time with a screaming baby, but it just shows why it is so difficult for any normal person to stand a baby screaming for a long period of time. After I found out about this information, I relaxed a little in regards to my previous thoughts of being a bad mother and realized that I am just a regular human being. Still if you do not want to risk your health the best solution is to make your baby scream less. If you ask me what you need for this, I will answer: patience, tenderness and lots of love.

My husband and I have already found several techniques how to calm our babies down and you can read about them in Baby Screaming Part 2 – How to Deal with It?

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