In most cases it is the mother who continuously takes care of the baby during the first months, but what happens when the father spends the same time with the baby? Why isn't the man going to hear the baby cry at night, or recognize him from a distance? No selective deafness: parents can also recognize their baby's cry.
Various studies carried out in previous decades showed that the mother had, in front of the father, a kind of instinct to recognize the crying of her baby. But the time parents spent with children was not taken into account. A recent study indicates that the father also recognizes the baby's crying, if you spend time with him.
It seems to me quite a logical matter, and it seems that there is no excuse for the father to get up when the child cries at night, because if the child does not want to breastfeed, the same can be comforted by the man than the woman.
The study in question, entitled "Fathers are just as good as mothers at recognizing the cries of their baby" ("Fathers are as good as mothers in recognizing the crying of their baby") does not stop on these issues, although it offers interesting data.
It has been published in Nature Communications and conducted by French researchers from the University of Lyon / Saint-Etienne, neurologists and the collaboration of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom). And what it shows is that both the father and the mother are equally good at recognizing their son only by hearing his crying.
And, in short, the ability to identify your own baby when crying It does not depend on the sex of the parent, but on the time you spend with your child. We will have other innate sex-specific predispositions, but this does not seem to be one of them.
The researchers suggest that future studies will have to investigate whether this ability of men to recognize the crying of their children has to do with the hormonal changes that occur with fatherhood, in particular, with the reduction of testosterone.
And, what about identifying the cause of crying? Is mom more skilled at it? Does it cost parents more to know why they cry for the baby? This seems to be the object of future research, but for the moment, in my opinion, I think that any new mother or father will be a mystery to those baby cries.
It will be a matter of "practice," that is, of time we spend with the baby, that we learn to decipher at least some of his cries, and that both moms and dads recognize the crying of their babies and identify it among other cries.
