Google ?Why is my baby crying"? and you?ll get millions of responses (no, really, there are 183 million at the moment) that try to answer the one question that every single parent asks. Surprisingly, there?s a very popular theory that doesn?t point a finger at the usual suspects: being hungry, having colic or gas pain, being too hot or too cold, wanting to be held, feeling too sleepy or overstimulated, having a dirty diaper or thinking you had the nerve to sit down while rocking. The theory not only suggests that there there is a simple reason for incessant crying but also claims that baby?s fussiness is a good thing and part of their development. Say what"
What is The Wonder Weeks, and how does it work"
The concept of The Wonder Weeks was developed by a Dutch husband-and-wife team, Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt, 40 years ago. Plooij is a behavioural scientist who studied mother-and-baby interactions, mostly in chimpanzees, and Van de Rijt studied educational psychology, as well as infant development in chimpanzees. They published The Wonder Weeks in 1992, and in the book they describe how babies go through mental developmental phases, or ?mental leaps,? that help them build awareness of the world around them. Since these stages often cause little ones to regress and experience frustration (everything is so strange and new in their world), they can be irritable, anxious (hello, clinginess!) and miserable. The doctors discovered 10 predictable mental leap...