"But look, nothing's wrong with him, he doesn't have tears," he told me while my baby cried, shouting "mom!" and she kicked. –But what is it that nothing is wrong with you, lady, perhaps you are blind, deaf and profoundly lacking empathy towards human emotions?
At what point has human beings learned and assimilated the popular belief that nothing happens to a baby without tears? Crying not a clear enough signal to guess that you need attention? Do tears correspond to a physiological or emotional process?
Cathartic and social function of crying
I would love to be able to write carefully about the physiology of tears, but the truth is that I must leave those words to the scientific community. What I do know is that crying has a cathartic and social function. Both have to do with the expression of emotions.
Cathartic function has to do with expressing emotion, releasing it, letting it flow, let go of it, take it out ... Have you felt how liberating it is to cry, right? The feeling of freedom, spaciousness, that remains with you later? That opening your chest, stop compressing it with the repression of emotion.
Y social function has to do with the expression of emotions to others. How do I express sadness, anger, fear, frustration ... to others? Crying, that is, making other participants in my individual catharsis.
Crying in babies: complaint
And how is this interpreted in babies? Newborns have no other mechanism to claim attention than crying; In this way they ask for love, they tell us that they are hungry, sleepy, cold or hot, that they feel pain, etc. As they grow up, they acquire other mechanisms to express the same needs (and the new ones that appear): gestures, sounds, words ... but crying remains one of these mechanisms. Babies, children cry because something happens to them, because they feel something. What nonsense is that that if they cry without tears nothing happens to them?
Pure theater
"He's a theatrical man." "Ah, well, yes, look, ma'am, we really like the theater." And it is Can you fake crying? In the theater, yes, of course, through corporal expression and vocal technique. And in life? Yes, probably too. But let's get rid of all those prejudices about manipulation or corruption of adults: babies lack these ideas, fortunately.
A baby, a child cries, with or without tears, because he needs to express a sensation or an emotion. Could it be that if there are tears it is sadness or pain, and if there are not, it is frustration or anger (this is just an example that occurs to me at the precise moment I write this sentence)? That is, can if there are tears it is related to a sensation and if there are not, to an emotion? What if it is arbitrary?
Have you ever felt a lot of desire to cry and have not been able to perform the action?, As if your body were challenging your insides. Have you ever cried inside, for being in an inappropriate context? Have you cried, with your eyes on the ground or at the window of a train? Have you ever been angry or yelled when you wanted to cry? And backwards? I just want to reflect on what motivates the crying of emotions, beyond the biological function of tears.
Cry = SOS
If our babies or our children cry it is because they need to convey to us what they feel because they need help. What they want is for us to satisfy a need, to relieve their pain, to listen to them, to help them, to support them, to accompany them ... And never to downplay what they feel or how they feel, that we ignore them or ridicule them, etc.
I needed to write this reflection. Let us educate our children in a world in which they are listened to, in which their needs are attended to and their emotions are validated.