Parenthood: Week 357 – Why Are They So Loud?

Ethan is REALLY loud.

He is wonderful, special, beautiful, charming, inspiring, and loving. But my goodness, he is loud.

Ethan current morning routine is waking up and then screaming, VERY loudly. If I’m around, I will pick him up out of his crib and he will actually calm down pretty quickly, until I put him down. Then he will start screaming for me to hold him some more. It’s all good. I believe that physical contact is essential to healthy emotional and physical development. However, when it’s like this morning and I cuddled literally an hour between 5am and 6am, and then put him down. I have less patience for his demands of cuddling.

There’s different strategies that I’ve tried to calm him when he screams at me. I’ve tried being stern, and raising my own voice. This doesn’t really work. It’s like yelling at a dog when it’s barking. The dog just think you are joining in with the fun. Yes, I’m comparing my son to a dog. In my view, there’s a ton of parallels between dog-rearing and child-rearing. Am I saying that I treat my son like my dog, no, but there are times the way I’ve handled Buffy has informed in a positive way I interact with my human children.

This morning I just let him scream. He wanted me to carry him the down stairs, I wanted him to walk, so he screamed. I didn’t want him to wake everyone up in the house, so I just carried him unceremoniously down the stairs. I got him a pouch of food, which he ate between screams. Then I got him a book that I knew he would like, and he settled down and look at it while I made breakfast.

I’m really glad that Ethan is so vocal. Children should exercise their vocal folds and use the whole range of their voices from whispers to screams.  One of the important things that we have been encouraging is for him to use speech to communicate. This is something is sometimes an issue with children like Ethan with unilateral hearing loss. Also, children who scream, and cry out, and “good” children. This way of interacting means that they are exploring different ways of social interaction, and have a healthy expectation that someone will at some point come and help if they cry out. Children who do get any kind of feedback when they cry eventually stop crying (e.g. babies is abusive orphanage situations). This leads to developmental problems.

One of the most wonderful things I hear I when Ethan talks to himself, or sings to himself. This too can get loud, but for the most part, it’s all good.

Especially early in the morning or during the stress of dinnertime, the loudness of my little ones, can be hard to handle. You combine Ethan’s exuberance with Ollie sing-along to “Into The Unknown,” in a borderline scream, would test any human being’s tolerance for sound.  Yes, it's a lot of sound, but it's loudness generally is more than sad and I'm glad that we live in a situation where I can give my children the space to be loud...and be themselves.