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Baby Talk

Your newborn can speak. The problem is you don't know her language. Here's how to decode what she's saying.

by: Nancy Ripton

hat new mom hasn’t wished her baby could just talk? Well, it turns out your newborn can communicate her needs. The problem is, you just don’t understand her language.

Deciphering Baby Talk

Priscilla Dunstan is a Sydney, Australia mom who was born with a rare photographic memory for sounds. She has the ability to hear patterns in sounds that no one else can hear. Like many new moms, Dunstan became frustrated during those first few weeks as a new parent. During a particularly bad night of crying she thought to herself: “I don’t think I can get up and do this again.” As Dunstan sat crying in the nursery with her son Tomas at 3:00 a.m. she decided the cries couldn’t be meaningless, and she set out to decipher them. She spent the next two years working with babies from around the world and soon found a pattern in the way they cried. “All babies, regardless of race or culture, make the same sounds,” says Dunstan. “I have amazing footage of babies crying on mud floors in a remote village in Turkey. These babies were making the same sounds as Tomas.”

Dunstan found that all babies have five “words” to communicate their needs. These words are actually reflexes that occur automatically during the first three months whenever your baby needs to eat, sleep, be burped or is uncomfortable. If you can learn to recognize these sounds and respond to them, your baby will cry less, settle more easily, and have more uninterrupted sleep.