Mothers' reports of infant crying and soothing

II MOTHERS' REPORTS OF INFANT CRYING AND SOOTHING Elinor W. Ames, Susan Gavel, Susan Khazaie, and Tricia Farrell, Simon Fraser University Mothers of infants between 2 and 18 weeks old (N = 337) completed a questionnaire concerning their infant's crying, soothing, and related variables. A PrinciPal Components analysis of all data concerning the infant's age, sex, weight, activity, temperament, wakefulness, contentment, and crying, and the mother's pregnancy and delivery, feeding practices, and responses to crying was performed, yielding 5 factors. The first factor contained gastrointestinal symptoms and associated crying. The second factor was a maturity factor including age, increased wakefulness, movement, and alertness, with crying decreased and present most often in the evenings. The third factor contained all the measures of amount of crying, and the mother's belief that infants should not be picked up when crying. The fourth and fifth factors related to possible overstimulation and to bottle and solids feeding, respectively. Analysis of 58 mothers' reports of the effectiveness of 10 soothing techniques was carried out by MANOVA and subsequent Tukey tests. It was found that mothers judge clear differences in effectiveness among soothers that have been found in experimental studies to be approximately equal in effectiveness. Feeding, walking, and rocking the baby were all judged to be highly effective (rated closer to "very effective" than to "somewhat effective") and superior to carriage ride, which in turn was superior to singing, giving a sucking pacifier, changing position, playing music, and talking, all of which received ratings in the "somewhat effective" range. Swaddling was less effective than all of the other methods.