Acknowledging the real challenges faced by infants and children during growth
events has profound implications. Reassurance about the normality of the experi-
ence could prevent negative repercussions that commonly arise from a lack of
parental understanding, such as early breastfeeding cessation during short-term
challenges of increased feeding frequency (Howard et al. 2006 ). More generally,
the escalation of parental distress in the face of ceaseless crying is associated with
increased risk of maltreatment (Reijneveld et al. 2004 ), including the catastrophic
outcome known as shaken baby syndrome (SBS) (Lee et al. 2007 ). An educational
program,“The Period of PURPLE Crying”has been created to address infants’
often inexplicable behaviors and has demonstrated success at enhancing parents’
awareness of both risk factors for SBS and specific coping strategies (Barr et al.
2009 ; Bechtel et al. 2011 ; Catherine et al. 2008 ).
Whether or not a formal diagnostic category is the best strategy is debatable.
Potentially negative consequences of medicalizing the growth experience include
creating unnecessary concern when a child’s growth does notfit the constructed
frame (Rosenberg 2002 ) and/or parents and physicians may be more apt to simply
accept growth as explanatory rather than considering other underlying etiologies
that produce similar behavioral manifestations (Batstra et al. 2012 ) but are corre-
lates of illness. Alternatively, medicalization can encourage mechanistic research
into the causes of symptoms and in turn stimulate the development of treatments,
with its own risks motivated by commercialfinancial interests (Conrad 2005 ). It is
important for parents to understand that biobehavioralfluctuations are, in fact, a
normal aspect of development, and care should be taken to decide how to legitimize
the subjective experience through objective research.
Conclusion
Explicating the biology of growth involved a fundamental change in research
design. The clarification that growth occurs as a digital signal not an analog signal
required sufficient sampling frequency tofind the signal—it was only silent to the
ears of science, not the ears and eyes of parents.
Given that common observations have failed tofit traditional scientific theory,
the reality of how children grow may seem surprising. An understanding of the
saltatory nature of growth helps to explain the remarkable variability inherent in
children’s development and provides a better perspective for how children expe-
rience growth. How the growth-related physiological milieu underlies psychobio-
logical phenomena that are observed by parents is only just beginning to be
unraveled. To be sure, growth is a lived experience for each child. It is likely to be
disruptive and disturbing to some children; therefore, the times when growth occurs
may demand special tolerance and particular sensitivity to the uncomfortable nature
of growth itself. Helping parents understand how their children experience growth
4 The Lived Experience of Growing 61