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Cry and be happy

Is crying the problem -- or the solution?

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Originally published in Today's Parent November 2010

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Oh, the agony. It’s the last animal cracker, or time to get out of the tub. The wailing starts, and soon two little cheeks are glistening with tears.

The parents’ instinct when kids cry is usually to make it stop. Our blood pressure shoots up into heart-attack territory. Ulcers start eating our stomach lining. How to stop the crying can be one of those impossible parental conundrums — a mystery akin to solving faster-than-light travel or filming a UFO.

But maybe we’ve been going about the problem all wrong. Some experts say it’s not about stopping the cries, it’s about listening to them. Crying isn’t the problem. It’s actually the solution to built-up distress.

Adults who are hurting inside are often told to have a good cry. Why shouldn’t it be the same for little ones? This revelation came to Patty Wipfler, a mom in Palo Alto, Calif., shortly after her second child was born.

Stress led her to start losing control with her infant and two-year-old. One day, she was asked by someone she had just met what it was like to be a parent. Wipfler burst into tears and sobbed for 15 minutes while her new acquaintance just listened.

Wipfler says that single cry was all she needed to become a new woman. Her stress melted away, and she became more patient with her kids. “The whole tone of our family changed,” she explains. It also got her to thinking that babies and toddlers have stress, too, and that crying can be something useful, not something to be feared and suppressed.

Wipfler devoted herself to studying kids’ emotions and, in 1989, founded Hand in Hand Parenting, a non-profit organization that gives parenting classes, training and consultations.

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