Babies cry, especially tiny newborns with no other way to communicate their feelings and problems. It takes a bit to try and learn how different cries from your baby mean different things. Sometimes you can make guesses, such as if it’s been 2 hours and baby is fussy, they might be hungry. Or if baby is crying and you feel a heavy wet diaper, changing it will likely fix the issue.
Sometimes it’s harder to find the answer, all the basic things such as food, clean diaper, burp, aren’t working and you are tired. No tired doesn’t cover it, you are bone deep exhausted, ready to fall asleep standing up and this baby is still fussy. What can you do? Well I’m going to highly some easy ways to soothe babies in the blog each week for a bit, and this week is humming.
I love humming for babies and parents. It’s super underrated! Humming is free, always available, and helps both parent AND baby! Let’s talk about what humming does and why it helps. So we need to start with the nervous system. We all have one, it tells us when to worry, when to stay calm, how much to react to that noise or problem in our life. Well babies and toddlers are what we call co-regulators. That means they cannot regulate, or control, their own nervous system. An infant, 1 year old or even 2 year old cannot just calm their own nervous system (this is why “self soothing” to sleep is actually giving up and not soothing at all). They rely on our nervous systems, those around them, especially the parent who is with them the most. That means if you are feeling really stressed out, your baby will feel it too. This isn’t to make you feel bad, just to think about the issue of the fussy baby differently. We don’t need to focus on just rocking and shushing the baby, we need to work on your nervous system as the parent first.
And humming is a great way to do that. Humming works in a few different ways. First, it’s a white noise type of sound, has a rhythmic quality that is soothing to our nervous system. Humming also vibrates through our body, calming with each little vibration. But what makes humming more amazing that rocking and shushing is that the vibration in our nose increases the nitric oxide that our nose produces. And we produce nitric oxide to help get oxygen out of the air. So with the vibration increasing the nitric oxide, we get more oxygen out of each breath we take. And more oxygen is always good!
Humming is amazing- it’s free, you can do it anywhere, you get more oxygen and calm yourself, and then are able to calm baby easier. And if you hold baby on your chest while humming, the vibration will also calm baby. Next time you are stressed about getting dinner made or baby is fussy, try some humming and see if it helps. Reach out, I’d love to hear how it helped you.