The Discontented Little Baby Book

For all of us, physical discomfort is less noticeable when the body is drenched in pleasurable sensation – a warm bath, for example, or a massage.

The baby’s crying is metabolically expensive, too, using up calories at a great rate. This means long bouts of crying actually create a catch-22 situation: the infant is too upset to feed but needs more feeds.

opportunity to unplug, to ground yourself in sensation, to remember a corporeal intelligence, to return to the landscape of the body

everyone later on. But it’s just not true.’

After 60 years of anxious, expert-driven over-control of family meal-times, we’ve finally learnt that parents need to relax about food intake. The little saying, ‘Parent provides, child decides’

It’s important not to put your hand or fingers on the back of your baby’s neck or head, because this triggers a back-arching reflex.

just over a third of babies at 3 months of age, sleep from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. without disturbing their parents most (though not all) nights in the week.

day. If overtiredness does occur in the Western baby, it is because the basic biological cues of sleepiness are being repeatedly overridden.

Daylight, however, is not the only environmental cue that helps to set the baby’s circadian clock to align with day and night. Babies also need the activities of daily living to help calibrate their circadian clocks: conversation, footsteps, siblings’ noisy play, clanging of cooking utensils, taps running, toilets flushing, cupboard doors banging,