4 Ways to Understand Excessive Crying in Infants and Help Parents
Few sounds work on a parent’s nervous system the way an infant’s cry does. And few questions frustrate parents and teachers more than the one that follows: “Why does this child keep doing that?”
The answer is closer to hand than the frustration suggests. Almost every behavior that happens over and over — including the crying that fills the first year of life — is driven by one of four basic motivations. Once a parent learns to read them, the behavior stops being a mystery and starts being information.
What is Motivation?
The question of motivation is centuries old, but Drs. Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence took a significant step forward in the mid-twentieth century with drive reduction theory (Hull, 1943; Spence, 1956). A drive builds — hunger when food is delayed, stress with no way to relieve it — and that drive motivates the person to act in ways already learned to bring the drive back down. The goal is relief.
In the early 1980s, behaviorism sharpened the concept into two types of antecedent conditions: those that make a reward more valuable in the moment (a Motivating Operation, or MO), and those that make it less valuable (an Abolishing Operation, or AO). A hungry baby finds food powerfully motivating; a full baby doesn’t. Same food, different motivational value, depending on the current state.
Around the same time, Dr. Brian Iwata and colleagues (1982) changed the question behavior analysts were asking. For decades, behaviorists had spoken of behavior mathematically: Behavior is a function of a trigger and its consequence — the car starting is a function of turning the key. Iwata’s shift was to ask instead what the behavior was for. Not “what is the crying a function of?” but “what is the crying accomplishing for the baby?” That small pivot — from mechanism to purpose — became the foundation of modern functional behavior analysis.
Dr. V. Mark Durand (Durand & Crimmins, 1988) then gave parents and clinicians a practical tool: the Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS), which organized the purposes of behavior into four functions.
The Four Motivators
Every repeated behavior — crying included — tends to be doing one of four jobs:
- Sensory stimulation — the behavior produces a feeling the body wants (soothing rhythm, release of tension, internal comfort).
- Escape — the behavior ends or avoids something unpleasant (noise, an overstimulating room, a demand).
- Attention — the behavior brings a caregiver close (eye contact, voice, touch, holding).
- Tangible objects — the behavior produces access to a specific thing (food, a bottle, a toy, a pacifier).
The same behavior — crying — can be doing any of these four jobs. Different cries, same sound. That is the “why” in “why is she crying?” There is no single answer until we look at what precedes the cry and what reliably ends it.
How to Evaluate the Four Motivators
Parents can read motivation with two simple tools:
- A-B-C analysis. Note the Antecedent (what was happening just before), the Behavior itself, and the Consequence (what immediately followed and how the child responded).
- Mini-experiments. Use the A-B-C pattern to form a hypothesis, then vary the consequence a few times to see which outcome reliably ends the behavior.
Here is what the four functions look like in the most common behavior of infancy — crying:
- Sensory: A baby cries rhythmically before sleep, even with a dry diaper, full stomach, and no one leaving the room. The crying itself seems to help her wind down. The cry is producing internal regulation.
- Escape: A baby begins crying in a loud restaurant or bright, crowded room and stops when a parent carries her outside into a quieter space. The cry ended something aversive.
- Attention: A baby is content in her bassinet until mom walks out of sight; crying starts within seconds and stops the moment mom reappears and speaks to her. The cry brought the caregiver back.
- Tangible: A baby cries near her usual feeding time, rejects a pacifier and rejects being held, and stops the moment a bottle is offered. The cry produced access to a specific thing: food.
A Mini-Experiment: Testing the Attention Function
Attention is the function parents most often misread — either assuming it is at work when it isn’t, or missing it when it is. A short mini-experiment clears the fog. Over the course of a few days, when the baby begins to cry after a caregiver leaves the room:
- Five times, return within a few seconds and respond warmly (talk, make eye contact, gentle touch) without picking her up or offering food.
- Five times, call out reassuringly from the next room but don’t return for thirty seconds or so.
- Five times, wait in sight without speaking or touching.
If the crying reliably stops on the first condition and not on the others, the function is attention — and specifically, close social contact. If quiet presence alone works, the function is proximity rather than active interaction. If nothing ends the crying except a bottle, attention wasn’t the real driver; the cry was tangible, and hunger is the answer.
The same structure works for the other three functions. Vary one thing at a time, watch what reliably ends the behavior, and the function reveals itself in a week or less.
How To Use What You Learn
Once the function is clear, parents have real choices. If a cry is disruptive and the function is known, delivering the motivator before the cry escalates can prevent the episode entirely — a diaper changed at the first hint of a poopy smell, a move to a quieter room the moment the baby starts to tense up in the crowd.
But prevention isn’t always the goal. If the function is tangible — the baby is crying because she wants food — parents can use that motivation to build communication. When feeding time approaches, wait for the “feed me” cry, then feed her. Over time, say the word “food” (or “milk,” or whatever the family uses) just before delivering the bottle, so the word gets paired with the arrival of food. Later still, wait for the baby to attempt the word before the bottle appears. The same motivation that once produced a cry now produces a word.
As the child grows, the logic extends. The diaper-change scenario becomes toilet training. The “feed me” cry becomes “please, food.” The attention cry becomes a tap on the shoulder or a spoken name. In every case, the parent is working with the child’s motivation rather than against it — shaping how the motivation gets expressed, essentially trying to use motivation to reward a desired action: crying to words (for example).
Bottom Line
Children do what they do over and over because it is working for them in one of four ways: it gives them a feeling, it gets them away from something, it brings someone close, or it produces a specific thing they want. A few days of careful observation and a handful of mini-experiments are usually enough to tell which of the four is in play. From there, parents can decide what to reward, what to reshape, and what to teach — and within a surprisingly short time, they can answer “why does my child do that?” like an expert behaviorist.
References
Durand, V. M., & Crimmins, D. B. (1988). Identifying the variables maintaining self-injurious behavior. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 18(1), 99–117. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02211821
Edwards, T. L., & Poling, A. (2020). Motivating operations and negative reinforcement. Perspectives on Behavior Science, 43(4), 761–778. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-020-00266-8
Hirsh, J. L. (2019). Functional analysis of excessive crying in infancy: Two empirical case studies (Dissertation No. 3418). Western Michigan University. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dissertations/3418
Hull, C. L. (1943). Principles of behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Iwata, B. A., Dorsey, M. F., Slifer, K. J., Bauman, K. E., & Richman, G. S. (1982). Toward a functional analysis of self-injury. Analysis and Intervention in Developmental Disabilities, 2(1), 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/0270-4684(82)90003-9
Joosten, A. V., & Bundy, A. C. (2008). The motivation of stereotypic and repetitive behavior: Examination of construct validity of the Motivation Assessment Scale. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 38(7), 1341–1348. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-007-0523-9
Spence, K. W. (1956). Behavior theory and conditioning. Yale University Press.