Save a Life; Know When to Walk Away

[Hollyadmin]

Sometimes the best advice a new parent can get is just to walk away.

It's a lesson Jonathan Dunkley of North Little Rock told reporters Monday that freed him from frustration.

Dunkley, whose daughter is now 19 months, said he was increasingly frustrated by his inability to stop the infant's crying.

It's a familiar frustration to many parents and caregivers, especially in the earliest months of a baby's life.

It's a survival technique built into the species: An infant's cry cannot be ignored. That's how those little balls of baby get the things they need - despite being unable to speak or move very far. Studies have shown that even other children will respond to infant crying with a rise in blood pressure. New parents, sleep deprived and unsure of their parenting skills, can find even normally fussy babies challenging. "Colicky" babies can overwhelm caregivers, sending them into a panic in which they will do anything to get the noise to stop.

Authorities at Arkansas Children's Hospital are afraid that shaken baby syndrome - the injuries typically found in a very young child who has been violently shaken - is on the rise.

In the 2008-09 fiscal year, the state saw 21 incidents of children younger than 2 who received injuries from shaking. In the first six months of this year, there have already been 12 reported incidents. According to state Division of Child and Family Services Director Cecile Blucker, nationally, one in four shaken babies will die; of those who survive, the majority will need life-long special care. Last year in Arkansas, four children reported to have been shaken died.

These are not cases of systematic child abuse, the kind that goes on for years and yields broken limbs, black eyes, tell-tale cigarette burns. Shaken baby cases result in brain injuries as the infant's brain slams back and forth against the skull. Sometimes, the child's head strikes the floor or wall, but that contact is not necessary. With the smallest babies, fatal shaking doesn't require much energy....


full article here: http://www.swtimes.com/opinion/we/article_82013a50-539f-11df-8547-001cc4c002e0.html

[MDT]

This is a technique I had to figure out early on and has saved me many times.  Walking away was easy for me.  What was hard was trying to find ways to calm down after walking away while the baby was still crying.  The longer I can hear his crying, the more frustrated I become.  Listening to music is probably the only thing that saves my sanity.  That way I can drown it out and get my mind on to something different.

[fbsurvivor]

I never really faced this, but I know my husband has a temper and it would make him really frustrated and angry that my daughter wouldn't stop crying.  Usually I would try to take her, but sometimes I was just too exhausted.  We both used ear plugs so that if one of us wasn't on duty, the other one could drown out the sound enough to sleep. When we really couldn't figure out what to do, my husband would just turn up the volume on the TV. 

I also thought it was kind of funny when he would get so mad at the temper that he had handed down to her.  He was mad at her for being mad.  It was a taste of his own medicine and he knew it.  My husband felt that our daughter was screaming at him, that she hated him.  I heard the same cry and I heard it as her being in pain and needing comfort.  I just reminded him as much as possible that she was an innocent baby that wasn't capable of those feelings. 

I honestly was terrified when my husband took paternity leave and I went back to work.  I think he did let my daughter cry more than I did, but he also really bonded with her and took her out a lot more.  He definitely would walk away when things got rough. 

I think also my husband and I are both fairly independent people and we could recognize that my daughter was frustrated by not having control and we related to that.  I think it always helps to put yourself in someone else's shoes, in this case our baby's shoes.