Okay, it’s official: There is such a thing as too much therapy. A pair of new parents have taken to the internet in search of advice on how to “set boundaries” with their infant, who cries incessantly whenever he wants something.
For decades, we all suffered under the collective lack of knowledge about psychology and mental health terminology. Now, we seem to have swung the pendulum much too far in the other direction. To the extent that we are trying to do boundary-setting with infants. Help.
New parents asked how to ‘set boundaries’ with their baby who won’t stop crying.
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Now, in fairness to these new parents, nothing about babies is easy, and much of it isn’t particularly intuitive. And that’s before we even delve into the impacts of having to listen to an infant shriek all day and then keep you up all night, too.
But these parents seem to really fundamentally misunderstand what they signed up for, seemingly viewing their relationship with their infant as more like, say, co-workers than, you know, parent and HELPLESS INFANT DEPENDENT UPON THEM FOR SURVIVAL.
The couple is so overwhelmed by the baby’s crying that they wrote into The Washington Post’s advice column for help. But it seems like their issue isn’t so much an excess of crying as confusing a baby crying with an unfair inconvenience, like a friend who constantly borrows money but never pays it back.
The parents want to set boundaries because their baby ‘cries until he gets what he wants.’
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The parents’ letter is bizarre right from the very start. “Our baby is in an almost-toddler stage right now,” they write. He is 10 months old and —” Ohhhhhkay, let me stop you right there. Ten months is not “almost-toddler stage” by any stretch of the imagination. That is an infant. He’s not even a year old!
They go on to write that their infant “cries every time we do something to set boundaries, and won’t stop until we get him what he needs.” Right, that is what babies tend to do, because they HAVE NO OTHER RECOURSE. They cannot speak, nor do they even have a developed prefrontal cortex in their brains to reason or do much of anything. Besides cry.
More importantly, babies are completely and utterly dependent on their parents and actually need their parents to answer their whims because that is how they learn proper attachment. “Setting boundaries” or any other means of refusing to meet a baby’s needs is, um, what’s the word we need here?… Let’s be kind and go with “incredibly, disturbingly dangerous.”
Babies need their parents to respond to cries in order for their brains to develop properly.
I don’t mean to be unkind to these parents, but their question is so far removed from reality that it’s hard not to be astonished. Babies are completely and utterly helpless. They are not manipulating you! More importantly, crying, their only means of communication, is not just about them getting a bottle or a snuggle when they want one. It is quite literally how their psychology develops.
When a baby’s parents consistently fail to respond to their cries and meet their needs, the baby learns that they cannot trust their parents, which leads to attachment disorders. This, in turn, can lead to a shocking array of developmental and mental health issues, from cognitive impacts to mental illnesses like personality disorders. This is incredibly serious stuff!
No parent can meet their baby’s needs 100% of the time, of course, and occasionally a baby will have to cry it out. That’s life. But “setting boundaries” with a baby as if their cries are some kind of manipulative game that needs to be rectified is so out of sync with what is developmentally appropriate that, even if unintentionally, it borders on neglect.
As the Post’s Meghan Leahy bluntly put it to these parents, “Guess what? You have to act as your child’s prefrontal cortex for YEARS, so it is best to get used to it now. It isn’t ‘boundary holding’ but simply your job as an adult.” Yes, exactly. And it bears mentioning that these parents, as so many do, completely misunderstand what boundaries are anyway.
“Setting boundaries” is about your own behavior, not someone else’s. It is not saying “stop yelling at me,” for example, it is saying, “if you continue to yell at me, I am going to leave the argument until things cool down.” You cannot do this with a baby. A baby is not capable of even holding a conversation about boundaries in the first place, let alone transgressing against their parents in order to need one.
At long last, can we please, please stop self-appointing ourselves experts in psychology because we learned a few buzzwords on TikTok, and listen to experts instead? There is no shortage of information about how caring for a baby works, and if you’re going to have one, familiarizing yourself with the rudiments should be the bare minimum.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
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