Who should read this chapter? Parents who are concerned that their child may grow up to be a cry baby. Such parents will want to understand the factors that make this type of behavior more likely so that it can be avoided or minimized.

Summary: Once children have entered Kindergarten, they are no longer babies. But some of them still cry like babies with only minor injuries or social stresses. Some children are naturally like this, but many children are unintentionally trained by their parents to behave this way. Parents often unintentionally reward their children for crying by carrying and cuddling them when they cry. This reinforces crying and it tends to make some children cry a lot as a reflex to even minor discomfort. Understanding the factors that encourage some children to become cry babies can be helpful. Will your child be a cry baby? It is probably preventable in most instances.

Have you ever noticed at a team sports event that some kids tend to be very dramatic when they get injured. I'm not talking about serious injuries which, of course, should get special attention. I'm talking about getting bumped or falling down. Some kids, simply put, cry a lot. They are called cry babies. Tears and a trembling voice come easily to these kids. The term "cry baby" sounds like an insult (something kids call each other on the playground), so let's call it something else; let's call this a "fragile child". Why do some children behave as if they were so fragile? Is there a cause for this? Do you want your child be like this (a fragile child)?

My children have played on many sports teams and I've seen many such fragile children. A typical example is a child who falls down during a soccer game and begins crying. This causes the whole game to stop. The coach must run onto the field and carry the child off the field. Perhaps this injury is more severe than it appears; however this pattern repeats itself again and again, and everyone watching the game knows that the injury is minor. None of the other kids behave this way when they fall down. Why is this child so fragile? Fragile children are not necessarily weak players. I've seen one of the best players on the team behave like this.

Every child is different. Crying is an emotion and one's tendency to cry is due to their inherent emotion level and sensitivity coupled with their learned emotions through their past experiences. As parents, we unintentionally reward children for crying, by picking them up to comfort them. Remember that parental attention and comforting is a reward. By doing this whenever children cry, we encourage them to cry more. This shouldn't matter a whole lot for infants (less than 1 year old) other than training them to sleep through the night. For the purpose of preventing your child from becoming a fragile child, the critical time period starts when they are walking well (the toddler years); about ages 2 to 5 years.

During this age, children sustain many minor injuries because they are clumsy and still learning to move about well. They will trip while walking, fall off the bed, scrape their knee or elbow, fall off a swing, bump their head, touch something hot, etc. These are minor injuries. Sometimes they will cry and sometimes they won't. Parents who carry and cuddle them while they are crying, are encouraging fragile child behavior because the child is being given a reward for crying. But it seems so cruel to not comfort children when they get hurt. Yes, you should comfort the injury, but don't overdo it.

Let's look at some examples. If your son bumps his head and cries, rub his head and tell him he's OK, but don't carry and cuddle him. If your daughter falls and scrapes her knee, wash it off quickly and put a bandage on it, but don't cuddle and carry her. If your daughter falls off the swing and cries, help her to her feet, make sure she can walk, find out if there are any painful areas, check to see how bad it is (is a broken bone a possibility?), and if she is OK, reassure her and encourage her to get back on the swing and to be more careful, but don't carry and cuddle her. If your son touches a hot pot, burns the tip of his finger, and cries, put a bandage on his finger and somehow tell him not to do that again, but don't carry or cuddle him. All these ways of comforting the injury, do not encourage or reward crying. If you really feel the need to hug your child, make it a brief quickie hug. Don't overdo it by embracing them for a long period while rubbing their back. This excessively rewards crying.

Some parents like the feeling that their child depends on them for emotional comfort. This is certainly understandable. When children cry and reach their arms out to you, it's natural to want to carry and cuddle them. This is OK, but this rewards and encourages crying. Once children enter school, their activities begin to distance themselves from their parents. When they fall down at school or on the soccer field, will you be there to pick them up and cuddle them? No, you won't be there. What might happen when they fall, is a crying fragile child scene that a teacher or coach must attend to.

I once went on a school field trip as a parent chaperone with my son's preschool class. We went to a museum and we were looking at the exhibits when one of the other kids (not my son) asked me to carry her. I told her she should walk like everyone else. Then she began crying. I just chose to ignore this since it's a bad idea to teach children to get their way by crying. Well apparently she already learned the wrong message. She just sat down on the floor and continued to cry. I continued to ignore her but one of the teachers eventually picked her up and carried her through the entire museum tour. In such an instance when a child is crying, it seems like carrying and cuddling them is the right thing to do. But if it is a behavioral matter that they are crying over, then it is the wrong thing to do. If they are crying over an injury, then comfort the injured part but not the entire body.

Teach them to be tough. The alternative is to train them to be fragile by rewarding them for crying. If this is what you want, so be it. Instead of this, my preference is to teach them to be tough. We live in a tough world. Children must learn to deal with some pain. They can't be falling apart whenever some pain is experienced. They shouldn't be taught that the entire world must stop whenever they feel some pain. In reality, the world goes on. When they get hurt, teach them to get right back up in the game to help their team.

By understanding how our actions reward children's behavior better, we can avoid unintentionally training our child to become a fragile child.