They usually are.

And no, I don’t mean “Is your preschooler hungry?”

They often won’t admit it, unless they’re at the house of a friend whose mother isn’t nearly as good a cook as you.  Political prisoners could take hunger strike lessons from a preschooler who has figured out that what mom really wants is for her to eat the green things, too.

But enough about cutting the edges off grilled cheese sandwiches  <flashback shudder>  let’s get back to the real question:  Is your newborn baby really hungry?

Signs of Hunger in Your Newborn

Because he is navigating this big, new, complex, noisy, sometimes chilly, sometimes stuffy world without words, your new baby will use strategies to communicate.

When he is hungry, here’s how he’ll try to tell you:

• If he’s asleep at all, it’s a light sleep.
• If awake, he is moving from the sleepier states into the more alert states.
• His arms are in motion.  Legs, too.
• Mouth, too.  He will start opening his mouth, moving his tongue around, making sucking  noises.  Your baby can give a hint, too.
• He sucks his hand for comfort (also does it for soothing sometimes, but look for more than one indicator of hunger.  You’ll detect them, Mom)
• Baby’s head might be moving toward you, your chest, your breast.  This is the rooting reflex that helped him find his first meal when he arrived on this planet.
• Timing is key.  Wailing for food is a last-ditch hunger signal.  The good news it that it will get easier to read the early, calmer signs of hunger.

He’s not hungry anymore when:

• He lets go of your breast, and moves his attention on to something else of interest.
• He turns away from your body.
• His body calms down.  The arms are at rest, the breathing is rhythmic.  Peaceful.
• He falls asleep after a long time at the breast.  Not to be confused with those ultra-sleepy new babies who are so tired they don’t show much interest in eating.

The best way to respond quickly and appropriately to your baby’s hunger is to learn the signs, then observe your baby for them.  It is possible to prevent the late-stage hunger signal of extreme crying.  A calmer feeding helps your baby’s digestion by starting him off with a better latch, and filling his tummy with milk, not gulps of air.  When he is calm, he won’t have to spend energy on settling down — he can instead use his free time to gaze up at you, the owner of his favorite face.

It sounds so urgent, looks so awful, and it does a new parent’s head (not to mention self-esteem) in when they feel unable to help their baby.

That’s kind of how crying is engineered — to be unpleasant.  To motivate you to solve the problem to which baby has just alerted you.  Yes, crying (“stress” translated into baby language) is contagious, but so is calm.

Before you pick up your baby, get a grip on yourself.  Do something to dissipate your anxiety  – something to calm you.  You could breathe … sigh … genuflect?

Clear your tension, so you’ll be able to focus on the work at hand.  Like translating your baby’s language of the cry.  By 3 to 4 weeks of parenting, you’ll have the skills to hear and decipher the different cries and their different meanings.

So your baby is speaking “Cry”, this mysterious, loud language.  Look on the bright side — by crying, your baby is expressing her belief in two important principles:  1) that her needs are important enough to speak up about, and 2) you will help her.  Later, she’ll add a third basic belief to her system:  Trust.

The calm and confidence of trusting you and the world you’ve provided will have a directly soothing effect.  She might even cry less.  Why shout when a whisper will do?

In an earlier blog post on emotional development, I discussed the varying states of consciousness (six of them) that newborns cycle through during the day.  During each day, which means they’re all normal states.  Only two of the states (so-called “fussy” state and the “crying” state) involve full-on howling.

Most of the rest of the time (in the other states of consciousness), your new baby has better things to do — like socializing, observing, listening, getting acquainted, nursing, or chillaxing (a fierce combo of chilling + relaxing).

If (okay, when) the crying does break out, however, hunger is understandably the usual suspect, and many new parents attempt to soothe a cry with food.  A rather safe guess, especially for breastfeeding moms.  It’s not easy to measure how much milk your child actually consumes during a session at the breast, and the amount quickly changes in response to changing nutritional needs.  So why not try that solution?

Then there’s the fact that babies often calm upon nursing.  So regardless of whether or not your infant was really hungry for that feeding you just offered her, the sucking might have soothed her.  Mystery solved, it seems.  Unless the crying continues.

Crying, without other hunger signals, could mean that hunger is not really the issue that baby needs your help to resolve.

More tomorrow on deciphering crying and what your baby really wants to say.