Unit 7 Text B The crying game, A) Or normal human infants cry. Although they vary great deal in how much a mysterious and still unexplained phenomenon is that crying tends to increase. In the first few weeks of life, peak the 2nd or 3rd month, and then decrease. Some babies in the United States cry so much during the peak period---often in the excess of three hours a day---and seem so difficult to soothe that parents come to doubt their nurturing skills to all began to fear that their offspring is suffering from a painful disease. Some other discontinue nursing and switched to bottle-feeding because they believe their breast milk is insufficiently nutritious and that their infants are always hungry. In extremely cases, the crying may provoke physical abuse, sometimes even precipitating( 导致 ) the infant death. B) A look at another culture, the Kung San hunter-gatherers of southern Africa, provides us with an opportunity to see whether care-giving strangers have any effect on infant crying, Both the Kung San and Western infants escalate( 使增强 ) their crying during the early weeks of life with a similar peak at two or three months. A comparison of Dutch, American and Kung San infants show that the number of individual crying episodes are virtually identical. What difference is their length: Kung San infants cry about half as long as western babies. This implies that care-giving can influence only some aspects of crying, such as the duration C) What is particularly striking about child-rearing around the Kung Sans is that infants are in constant contact with a caregiver; they are carried or held most of the time, are usually in a upright position, and are breast feed about four times an hour for one or two minutes at a time. Furthermore, the mother almost always responds to the smallest cry or fret (烦躁) within 10 seconds. D) I believe that crying was adapted for our ancestors as seen in the contemporary Kang San, Crying probably elicited a quick response, And thus consisted of frequent but relatively short episodes. This pattern helped keep adult close by to provide adequate nutrition as well as protection from predators. I have also argued that crying helped an infant for the strong attachment with the mother---because new pregnancies are delayed by the prolongation of frequent nursing--- secure more of her care giving resources. E) In the United States, where the treat of a pediatrician has received. And adequate nutrition is usually available even with breast feeding, crying, maybe less adaptive. In any case, the caregiving in the United States may be viewed as a cultural experiment in which the infant is relatively more separated---and separable---from the mother, both in terms of frequency of contact and actual distance. F) The western strategy is advantageous when the mother's employment outside of the home and always from the baby is necessary to sustain family resources. But the trade-off seems to be an increase in the length of crying bouts.