After two entries explaining some of the characteristics that the high demand babies, today we finish with the four remaining characteristics.
Summing up a bit, we have said of the high demand babies they are intense, hyperactive, absorbent babies, who often feed, demanding, who often wake up, dissatisfied and unpredictable.
Hypersensitive
They are very sensitive babies to any change because they are very aware of their surroundings. They need a known and safe environment and easily alter if the balance is disturbed.
Unlike many other babies, who can be calm and even sleep with the daily noises of everyday life, these babies easily startle and wake up "with a flying fly".
This hypersensitivity also occurs at other levels. They react almost exaggeratedly to physical and emotional discomforts. It is common for them to cry shortly when something bothers them (a cold, teeth, ...) and it is difficult for them to accept a caregiver who is not their primary caregiver.
They need continuous contact
They are babies that they need continuous contact. Arms, many shots of milk, contact at night, etc. They are common strategies to calm that need for contact.
You may have already bought a beautiful mobile phone for the crib waiting for him to look at it alone, you can already have bought a crib waiting for him to sleep in it, you can already have a hammock to leave it for a little while sitting while you remove the food, you can already have bought a stroller for a walk to sit on the street ... none of it will seem good to you, since none of it involves contact with your parents.
They do not fall asleep in the crib or stay asleep for too long if you pass them after falling asleep, they do not want to be sitting in the hammock, not even in the stroller (and that it moves). In short, they don't want to be anywhere other than in their parents' arms.
They don't calm down by themselves
They always need the contact of their parents and other maneuvers (rocking, breastfeeding, rocking and breastfeeding at the same time, caressing them in your arms, ...) to fall asleep. It is as if they themselves do not know how to relax and always need our help to do so.
Other babies are able, at some point, to fall asleep in the stroller, in the car with the swing of the road or even in the arms without their parents noticing ("what a pity, I fell asleep!") . The high demand babiesInstead, they always need several rituals to relax and fall asleep.
There are parents who, given such difficulties in sleeping them and considering that they wake up very often, end up trying to "let him cry, he will get tired and he will fall asleep". It's not that it doesn't work, since sooner or later (probably late) they just stopped crying, however they are babies that don't calm down easily and cry more and more and more (and more and more), generating a very high level of stress when the ideal is that we help them relax, that the tranquility and moving from an active state to a more passive state is really what they do not know how to do.
Sensitive to separation
They are children who do not accept other caregivers, even the father is usually rejected many times if mom is not going to be present.
The parents explain that it is as if they lived in a period of distress of continuous separation, without the possibility of being cared for or held in the arms by any other person.
All children live moments like this in one or another period of their childhood, but there is always some phase in which they are more receptive and open to meet new people or, at the very least, to be allowed to be taken by other people, either before 7-8 months, either after passing that period. These babies instead seem to lose their lives when they separate from their mothers. Even when they are able to move on their own, crawling or walking, they chase their mother everywhere (to the kitchen, to the sink, to ...), the mothers coming to feel that something they have done very badly to get their child to be increasingly dependent.
It is a stage, like everything else, and over time they begin to take confidence in themselves and to be better able to do things without the constant presence of their mother. It is a phase that must pass, since to be independent they need, like all babies, to be dependent first.
Respecting his dependence, we will be able not to force situations "so that he learns a little to be without a mother" at the risk that his mother's non-presence will generate even more anxiety and insecurity and cause even more dependence.
And in a few days ...
We will talk about what it means for parents to have a high demand baby and "what happens" when someone explains what a high demand baby.
