A couple different times I have managed to run across this article that claims that “African babies don’t cry”. The author (an African doctor and mother) explains how whenever an African baby cries the mother puts it to the breast. Without exception. Through the day, all night long, hiring nannies to get other tasks done or leaving things undone all together. For many reasons this sounds entirely impractical to me and feels like just another one of those guilt inducers- if I were able to constantly breastfeed my children then they would never have felt the need to cry. You know, maybe it would have worked if I had tried it (which would probably mean paying someone else to raise my other kids until this experiment was over, which might in fact cause them to cry), but that would assume the goal of my parenting is that my child never cries. That is not my goal.
You know who else doesn’t cry? Orphanage babies. My first child didn’t cry much at all. This was not a good thing. He spent his first ten months in an orphanage where he needed to be fed/changed/napped on a schedule. His needs didn’t necessarily matter. How else do you manage 20 infants with just a few caregivers? They did what needed to be done to meet the needs of their children and they clearly loved those babies, but my child learned crying didn’t change his situation so he quit crying. When he started really crying after his placement with us it was for two things: food (he was 10 pounds at 10 months-old) and his mama. Those cries were some of the most beautiful sounds I’d ever heard. In my experience, crying is communication. It may mean hunger, sleepiness, a desire for mama, who knows sometimes! So I don’t strive to make sure my child never cries. I’m not judging my success as a parent by if my child is crying or not. (This is an incredibly beautiful post by Russell Moore on the topic of silent orphanage babies)
A couple nights ago we decided to do a family movie time with the kids. We made some pizza and the kids picked out “The Fox and the Hound”. They enjoyed it well enough, but after the final credits rolled I remembered there were some Disney shorts left to play. So we sat with our three adopted kids snuggled in our laps and watched “Lambert the Sheepish Lion” together. And (of course) I cried.