Crying Baby flowchart for Software Developers
Original posting 11/11/2016
One of the hardest things to deal with as a parent is a crying baby. In this blog, I’m going to attempt to describe how I approach soothing my baby when he cries from the perspective of a software developer. My son, Lucas, was 3 months old. I’ve since replaced writing code for Daddy duty.
While there are different types of cries, such as boredom, hunger, … for the harder cries, I’ve found I usually follow a pattern of actions. For example, if he’s crying in the middle of the night, I first reach for my feeding app to see the last time he ate. (Lucas can only go 3 hours without a feeding) I may pick him up and give him a pacifier. At some point, we go outside … and the list goes on.
How did I come up with the actions on this list? Most of these soothing actions I got from my wife, googling, parenting books, and a Dad Bootcamp, But unfortunately, soothing a crying baby can feel like troubleshooting a faulty web app where all your servers are queued and where all you have to work with is a log file that says “whaaaaaa” … and it’s 3 AM.
But over time, you learn to apply the actions you’ve learned and turn those actions turn into decision tree-like sequences. So, being the geek I am, I attempted to flowchart out my approach to soothing my crying baby.
Notes:
- Hungry? The first thing we look for is hunger signs as well as the last time he ate.
- Overtired? This is a loaded one. If he’s overtired, he’s going to be harder to put down. We rely on the app to see how much he has slept as well as recognizing certain overtired tones in his cries.
- Fresh air. A great trick is taking Lucas for some fresh air. Babies love being outside and the contrast of the sky and trees must be super stimulating.
- Wear him. If all that failed, then we wear him. We use an Ergo Baby — he loves it in there. We are trying not to make that our go-to solution however since we don’t want to be in the habit of wearing him all day.
Now, much of your flowchart will come from the needs of your child, or maybe you don’t even need one because your baby is always 100% happy. (yeah right?) But if not, thinking about your flowchart and steps you’ll take to handling his crying, while he is not crying, can be super helpful and save a ton of anxiety.