Uglyhead

The other day my wife called me at work to tell me about the day’s Oprah episode, The Secret Language of Babies. One of the guests, Australian mom Priscilla Dunstan, talked about how her photographic memory for sound helped her unlock the secrets behind babies’ cries.

The five words (really reflexes) that babies zero to three months old utter are:

• Neh = “I’m hungry”
• Owh = “I’m sleepy”
• Heh = “I’m experiencing discomfort”
• Eair = “I have lower gas”
• Eh = “I need to burp”

It may sound hoakey to some people, but who has not heard a mother say, “Oh, that’s his hungry cry,” or, “He sounds like he’s wet and needs a diaper change?” Pamela and I are fairly attuned to Ethan’s cry patterns (her moreso than me) and we were both shouting, “That’s so true!”

Those “words” are actually sound reflexes, Priscilla says. “Babies all around the world have the same reflexes, and they therefore make the same sounds,” she says. If parents don’t respond to those reflexes, Priscilla says the baby will eventually stop using them.

Priscilla recommends that parents listen for those words in a baby’s pre-cry before they start crying hysterically. She says there is no one sound that’s harder to hear than others because it varies by individual. She also says some babies use some words more than others #.

Just the other day I was changing Ethan’s clothes and he uttered a few “heh, heh, hehs” as I struggled to squeeze his head and arms through the top of his onesie. You could tell that I was making him uncomfortable and so it would seem that Dunstan is on to something here. What are your thoughts or experiences with newborn noises? Can you identify your baby’s cry, too?