Feel like sitting down is pretty much bound to get your baby to start wailing again?
You are not alone.
So what do you do? Stand up and sway and rock him – it's almost like an instinct, isn't it?
And guess what? It actually is.
"Infants under 6 months of age carried by a walking mother immediately stopped voluntary movement and crying and exhibited a rapid heart rate decrease, compared with holding by a sitting mother," say authors of a 2013 study published in Current Biology.
When babies cry, we often stand up, knowing a bit of swaying will soothe them. And as it turns out, that's because standing up to calm babies is instinctual—driven, in fact, by centuries of positive feedback from calmed babies, according to the researchers.
In the case of standing with babies, the researchers concluded the "infant calming response to maternal carrying is a coordinated set of central, motor, and cardiac regulations and is a conserved component of mammalian mother-infant interactions."
We are not alone even, in doing this, the scientists found. This coordinated set of actions—the mother standing and the baby calming—is observed in other mammal species, too.
So what can we take from this? Well, how about this: You, as your baby's mother, instinctively know what to do when it comes to your own child. Even when you are a new mama and everything feels daunting and overwhelming, you are already, unbeknown to you, working in sync with your baby, your body gently "telling" you what you need to do.
Now how's that for mama magic?
