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Home › Articles › Discipline › Screaming Babies and Toddlers

Screaming Babies and Toddlers

When Baby Shrills and Screeches

By Teri Brown

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There's a time in a parent's life when the unthinkable happens: Their formerly quiet baby becomes a noisy baby. As in a really loud, screeching baby.

Jasmine*, mother of two from Germantown, Md., says her son started screeching at about a year old and didn't fully stop until he was about 2 1/2 years old.

"Mostly, he would screech when he was bored," Jasmine says. "One of his favorite times to screech was in restaurants, right after we had ordered the food. It was so hard because we couldn't eat out very often. To get around this, we would walk him around right after the food was ordered and not bring him back to the table until the food had arrived."

A shrieking baby and a shrieking toddler are two different creatures, but the noise mostly stems from the same thing – their inability to tell you what they really feel or want.

Babies: Finding Their Voice
Sharon Hausmann, the executive director of Smart Start, the early childhood division of United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, says it's important for parents to learn how to "read" their babies.

"Babies have a voice starting at birth, whether it is cooing, crying or gurgling," Hausmann says. "While they may not use words, babies have several ways to communicate with parents and caregivers. Parents can learn to understand a child's nonverbal communication and behavioral cues, such as the sounds she makes, her facial expressions, the way she moves and the way she makes (or avoids) eye contact. Learning to effectively respond to these cues in the early months of her life will make communicating with her much easier when she is able to speak in complete sentences [around] the age of 2."


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Screaming Babies and Toddlers by Anonymous on 02/18/2010 08:45AM

This article is pointless. No one cares why my 20 month old is screeching. We want to know good tips or techniques to stop it.

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