The crying of a baby is its form of communication during the first months and it is natural, but it can worry the parents because we do not know what it is due to. That's why they proliferate books and studies that try to decipher the cries of the baby.
In this case we talk about a scientific study that the Spanish Association of Pediatrics has done in collaboration with the National University of Distance Education and the universities of Murcia and Valencia, and which has finally been published in a guide.
The gestures of 50 children between 4 and 13 months have been studied. The result is this expression guide that aims to help parents and professionals understand the gestures of children.
The key is to learn to differentiate crying: those of fear, anger or pain. From 3 months of age you can analyze the facial and vocal expression of babies. Through these analyzes, in response to different stimuli or actions, it has been attempted to find a specific pattern that distinguishes the main emotions.
The work, which was presented yesterday in Madrid and has been funded by the Nuk Baby Institute, and has identified six gestural patterns after studying the vocal and gestural characteristics of 43 babies from which 400 video sequences were obtained.
Some of the reactions, such as those of fear and anger were provoked to record the identifying traits (poor things). To analyze the expressions of pain, images of babies were used at the time of injecting them with a vaccine.
Either way, in my opinion I don't think it's the magic formula for deciphering babies crying, and although it can guide us, it does not give us the solution either, that for the time being we continue to look for it patiently by the parents through the traditional method of trial-error.
