emotions
Tears heal. We all know the feeling of having a good cry - especially in the presence of someone we love. Here, Kate Orson tells us how crying makes kids feel happier and healthier too...
Te crying game: how ‘Tears Heal’
‘But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.’ (Hans Christian Anderson, Te Little Mermaid)
intuitively sensed for years: that crying makes us feel happier and healthier, and that it is part of our body and mind’s natural inbuilt process for recovering from stress and upset. As parents of infants and toddlers, however, we find that tears are one of the most challenging aspects of our role. We tend to judge the success of our parenting by how much our children cry. We feel like wonderful parents when our babies are smiley and at ease, but we feel terrible when they cry for what seems to be no reason and we just can’t get them to stop. William Frey, a biochemist, conducted a
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pioneering investigation of the chemical composition of tears. He found that those shed for emotional reasons contained cortisol – the stress hormone – whereas those induced by raw onions contained only saline solution. Tis suggests that when we
64MODERNMUM
hakespeare wrote that ‘to weep is to make less the depth of grief ’, and now scientific research supports what writers and thinkers have
cry for emotional reasons we are literally releasing stress from our bodies and that crying is an essential part of the recovery process from stress and trauma. Seen from this perspective, having a colicky baby or a tantruming toddler is not necessarily a direct reflection of how we are parenting but more to do with the experiences our child has had or is going through – experiences that are oſten completely out of our control. Life is full of events and changes that can bring stress to our families. As parents, we are all trying our best, and just because your child is having an emotional upset it doesn’t mean that you aren’t doing a good job. Just before becoming pregnant with my
daughter, I was working as a babysitter for a five-year-old boy. Te first few times I looked aſter him he had tantrums if we didn’t have the kind of snack he wanted or when we had to leave the house quickly to go somewhere. I didn’t know what to do. I found myself
thinking, 'he’s not a toddler; he shouldn’t be having tantrums'. I assumed that there must be something wrong with him, because he cried occasionally – it was the kind of judgement that only a non-parent can make.
I went home and Googled ‘what to do
about tantrums?’. I felt like I needed some kind of method to get them to stop. I read suggestions about using time out or ignoring the behaviour, but neither of these felt right to me. How could I ignore or punish a child who was clearly upset? I Googled a bit more and came across
the idea of simply staying close, offering empathy and warmth, not using distraction to try to stop the child from crying, but simply being there, until the tantrum was over. It seemed so obvious, but I hadn’t thought
of it until I read those words. I actually didn’t need to do anything. I just needed to be there, staying close until the storm had passed. Tere’s something so unruly, so wild about tantrums that I felt that I needed some expert advice on how to handle them. But in actual fact, all I needed to do was follow my natural instinct to be a warm, loving caregiver. A few months later I became pregnant
and bought a book called Te Aware Baby by Aletha Solter, which I’d seen recommended on the website about tantrums. I was simply intrigued by the title.
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