Baby

What's high need?
Bob Sears, a California paediatrician, knows the answer to those perplexing questions: “Yours is a high-need baby.” (Sears, one of the experts on the askdrsears.com website, is the son of Dr. William Sears, author of The Fussy Baby.) “High-need babies need the same things as all babies do; they simply need them all the time instead of intermittently,” he explains. “They need to be held pretty much all the time, they need to suck more, they need to move around more. While a more easygoing baby can often be put down to amuse herself for a while, a high-need baby wants to be in arms and in contact with a parent.” For parents of high-need babies it can seem like the only thing their babies don’t need more of, is sleep.

These infants have been called fussy, colicky, difficult, spirited and, sometimes, spoiled. But most parents aren’t looking for a label. Rather, they’re hoping for some understanding of their baby’s behaviour.

For parents like Lea Adams, whose toddler son, Owen, fits the high-need description to a T, hearing that she’s causing her son’s fussiness by spoiling him is harder to take than trying to deal with his often-challenging temperament.

“By far the worst part,” says Adams, “has been the advice from people telling me that Owen is this way because of my parenting. People have blamed it on everything from breastfeeding to co-sleeping to carrying him too much. I’ve had any number of drugs suggested, I’ve been told to put him in a crib and walk away from him when he cries, and I’ve even been told I should scream in his face when he screams.”

Bob Sears is adamant that parents do not create high-need babies. “Every baby’s personality and temperament is genetically ingrained. Parenting does affect a child’s behaviour and personality in the long run, but certainly in the early months this influence isn’t as strong as genetics. How do we know this? Because high-need babies are clearly born this way. Ask any parent of one if the baby was easygoing for the first few weeks and then became more needy. They’ll tell you it started from day one.”

Donna Wiberg definitely saw the “high-need” signs right from the beginning. She already had two children (sons Alexander and Brady) when her daughter Stephanie was born, and she knew immediately that there was something very different about this child.

“Stephanie was not like the others because she cried so very much,” says Wiberg. “That is, unless I was holding her or nursing her. She had to be constantly touching me and would not go to anyone else, not even her father.”

Owen was Lea Adams’ first baby, but she didn’t need a houseful of kids to know that he was more intense than the other infants she’d seen or heard about.

“The first clue I had that Owen was a high-need baby was when he was a newborn,” recalls Adams. “He nursed constantly — he was nursing every 45 minutes to an hour all day and all night, and he cried and screamed if put into a swing or bassinet. He was only content in someone’s arms or in a sling.”

Originally published in Today's Parent Baby & Toddler, Spring 2006