

Fathers Recognize Their Babies’ Cries Just as Well as Mothers - jacobr
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/04/fathers-recognize-their-babies-cries-just-as-well-as-mothers/

======
Pxtl
I'm three months into my half of our evenly-split year of parental leave. If
you have the legal ability to do this, do it.

Most _cough_ civilized _cough_ countries allow both parents to take some form
of leave - here in Canada it's 12 months to be divvied up, with only 4ish of
which are required to go to the birth parent. The EI system pays you EI
benefits (half your regular wage or $25k/yr, whichever is less), and your
employer's only responsibility is to keep your space available for when you
get back.

Let me tell you, staying home with my kids and doing the stay-at-home dad
thing has been Goddamned magical. I'm constantly exhausted and exasperated by
my three little juggernauts, but I'm loving it.

And yeah, I'm getting all those instincts out the yin-yang. I can perfectly
understand my two-year-old's incoherent babble, I can distinguish a cry at a
hundred paces, I've got the lightning parental reflexes, etc.

Do it.

~~~
chernevik
Mileage varies. I was reasonably tuned to a lot of this stuff, and I was
working 60-80 hour weeks. Part of it is just feeling that it is your
responsibility to deal with this stuff.

My wife was definitely _more_ aware, but I wasn't far behind. She could leave
for a weekend and it wasn't a problem, I needed a rundown on where stuff was
and schedule but I handled the kids just fine.

Yes, I did sleep through more of their crying. But the time my daughter woke
screaming from some nightmare, I was up the staircase before I woke up.
Seriously, my first conscious memory was my foot pushing up a stair. My wife
appeared three minutes later asking if the baby had cried. When the daughter
wandered into the woods and lost herself I was looking for her five minutes
before any one else noticed she was gone. Et cetera.

Which isn't to knock what you are doing, just to say it isn't the only way.

------
akent
TL;DR: Parents, including fathers, who spend more time with their babies come
to recognize their cries better.

Not sure if that's really as counter-intuitive as the article suggests.

~~~
belorn
They explains this in the article. They cite a study that show that around 50%
of people think than mothers are better at recognize their child cries than
fathers.

~~~
akent
"But previous studies didn't take into account the amount of time parents
typically spent with their children on a daily basis."

I'm saying the new finding that "more time -> better able to recognize" is
also not surprising.

~~~
saraid216
You were offered evidence; you are not offering counter-evidence.

------
jroseattle
One-off anecdotal proof exists as well:

I'm at a recent multiple family gathering at a friend's house. All the Dads
are playing a hand of cards, the collective of kids playing in the basement. A
quick yelp is released, and we all look up, everyone attentively listening for
the follow-on cry. The secondary, longer cry happens and one of the Dads
acknowledges: "that's mine, I'll be right back."

This is standard operating procedure, and has evolved as the kids have gotten
older. Now, when our 10-11-12 year olds let out a welp, the Dad-in-question
will generally yell out: "everything OK down there? Does anyone need help?"

And as I've spent more time with others' offspring, I can detect their voices
(and cries) as well. It's environmental.

~~~
gregpilling
I have four kids and it works with me too. It is a funny thing, to be at a
large kids' birthday party and then suddenly your ears can pick out the sound
that your child is making amongst all the other noise. It also helps that my
kids all sound similar in how they cry, so I think it is partly training
(hearing the kid cry over the years) and genetics (my kids all sound similar
when they cry).

I find the other parents can also distinguish their children. It has never
seemed to me to be a mother or father dominant trait. An involved parent trait
possibly, but not gender related.

~~~
lostlogin
I'd also note that parents notice a distressed child before non-parents do -
at least in our group of friends. Hypersensitised hearing I think.

------
biot
In other news, if a live-in infant caregiver (male or female) that you have
hired spends more time with the baby than the natural parents do, he/she will
recognize the baby's cries better than the natural parents. Also, parents who
adopt an infant child. Or hospital workers in children's ICU.

It's simple pattern recognition, just as how an experienced musician might be
able to tell when someone else is playing their cowbell ("It has this very
particular _clonk_ when hit on the side") better than their non-musical spouse
could.

------
crcsmnky
Hrmph. Not according to my mother-in-law. As a father I'll never understand
the bond between mother and child.

~~~
lostlogin
Although she may note that having you dislike socializing with her seems to
result in shorter visits and less of them. Presumably also affecting
child/grandparent bonding.

------
DigitalSea
This makes sense. To me this shows we're a well adapted species capable of
filling the shoes of another when need be. This fact can't be more evident by
the fact when my partner does night shifts she makes sure everything is ready
to go as I am hopeless at cooking. I step up to the plate and adapt to the
situation I wouldn't usually be in charge of handling.

I used to always think it was only mothers who could recognise the cries of
their child, but it does make sense if you spend enough time that you develop
a maternal instinct. We are firm believers we're free to live our lives how we
choose, but can't ignore the fact we're programmed from the beginning to be a
certain way already.

~~~
kevingadd
Nitpick but:

'Maternal' instinct -> motherly instinct

Isn't the linked article describing this as a behavior that is common to
parents of either gender? We merely assume that it is a maternal instinct.

"The factor that best predicted which parents were best at identifying their
child’s cries was the amount of time the parent spent with their babies,
regardless of if they were the mother or father."

This does not describe a maternal instinct that happens to be approximated by
fathers, to me. It describes a parental instinct that is not gender-related.

~~~
sliverstorm
_We merely assume that it is a maternal instinct_

I've noticed that our society seems to overrate the whole category, perhaps
out of deference to the women who bear the brunt of having children, perhaps
to help reassure young women considering children.

~~~
XorNot
Or to excuse absentee fathers, and the striking disparities in unpaid work
between the sexes, globally?

------
Vivtek
I could have told you that. I can tell you that the same mechanism works for
your own dog's barks, too, something my wife and I have laughed about
recently.

~~~
dagw
Science doesn't work by "I could have told you that". It works by proposing an
hypothesis and then testing it (preferably over and over again). Scientists
cannot skip the testing stage just because the hypothesis is 'obvious'.
Because once every few hundred experiments your obvious hypothesis based on
intuition, personal experience and anecdote turns out to be wrong.

------
flagnog
Not only that, we can tell by the sound if the cries what they want. For
instance, our first child had three cries: bad diaper, feed me, and hold me. I
knew exactly what she wanted from the sound of her cry.

------
aspensmonster
@sabat, you're hellbanned. Looking through your comment history I can't tell
why.

His comment:

>Anecdotally, when my son was a baby, I definitely knew his cry, and it felt
instinctual (although in truth, it's probably just subconscious recognition).

~~~
niggler
The comment that triggered the hellban was:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399303>

"I love how Jason Fried, the most self-important man in software (who can't
code) is first on the list to diss the security patches. Fuck you, Jason.
Learn to code. Then you can diss."

I imagine that telling someone "fuck you" directly is a hellbannable offense
(even if the sentiment is genuine)

~~~
aspensmonster
I'd expect more than a single off-color comment before banning someone. This
particular user has a long set of perfectly valid and relevant comments
throughout his comment history. There should be a pervasive problem with the
user that fails to be resolved, even after an open dialog with others, before
the community resorts to the boot. Even then, there's no reason for a hell ban
specifically. Hell bans are meant to throw off unmonitored spammers who aren't
meticulous enough to check that they do in fact have clean accounts to spam
through. The Jesus-Spam that's been making the rounds recently is a good
example; lots of Bible verses and more or less the exact same message in every
post, not at all relevant to the link. Obvious spam. Sabat obviously isn't in
this category.

However, the moderation system on HN isn't even opaque; it's a pitch black
box. Zero accountability.

~~~
nitrogen
What you refer to as "Jesus-Spam" is the tragic rambling (and randomly
generated "messages from God") of a talented software developer with
schizophrenia.

<http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html>

<https://www.hnsearch.com/search?q=losethos>

<https://www.hnsearch.com/search?q=sparrowos>

~~~
ars
And the messages are not random! If you read them you'll see they always have
relevance to the topic at hand.

~~~
nitrogen
Usually I've seen a paragraph or two of related and often insightful
commentary, interspersed with randomly selected biblical verses or Markov
chains (the "God says" sections).

