What’s High Need?

After almost a year I’ve come to term with the fact that my son is just different than other easy babies out there. No wonder other parents don’t complain that much about how tiring to raise their kids..huhu! And yet here I am, thinking and feeling like “is it this hard to bring up a child??”

Taken from an article : Live Wire: Caring for High-Need Babies – Caring for the baby who is more sensitive, unpredictable, intense and hard to soothe by Teresa Pitman

“High-need babies need the same things as all babies do; they simply need them all the time instead of intermittently,” he explains.

“They need to be held pretty much all the time, they need to suck more, they need to move around more. While a more easygoing baby can often be put down to amuse herself for a while, a high-need baby wants to be in arms and in contact with a parent.”

For parents of high-need babies it can seem like the only thing their babies don’t need more of, is sleep.

Honestly, life is not all thorns with a high need baby like my son. As he is an intense person, I always feel that he loves me deeply as he gazes adoringly into my face as he drifts off to sleep at 4am, like he wants to make sure that I am the last thing on his mind..something very hard to describe but enough to make me feel that all the hardship in a day work as a mother finally pays off.

Parenting a high-need baby is an intense and demanding experience, but there is good news. “We like to encourage parents about what they have to look forward to,” says Sears. “We call it the payoff. Those high-need babies, if they are parented in a sensitive, responsive and involved way, grow up to be truly wonderful children. They are energetic, outgoing, confident — they are leaders, not followers.”

Yes, I would want that in my son!

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