Hop To! Your Crying Baby Expects You To Comfort Them, Study Shows

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 16, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Crying babies absolutely expect caregivers to come comfort them and are confused if this doesn’t happen, a new study says.

Babies registered surprise when shown a mother ignoring a crying infant to keep performing household chores, researchers reported recently in the journal Developmental Psychology.

“Even before infants can speak, they hold expectations about positive caregiving experiences,” lead researcher Kexin Hu said in a news release. Hu is a doctoral student in human development and family studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

For the study, researchers showed more than 75 infants a series of videos of a woman performing household chores.

The experiment then exposed the tots to two test videos: one in which the woman ignored a crying baby to continue her chores, and another in which she interrupted her chores to go comfort the baby.

By measuring how long the infant looked at either of the two test videos, researchers could determine which surprised them more. It’s well-known that infants look longer at things they find unexpected or surprising, researchers said.

“If they look longer at the unexpected event, it suggests they are trying to figure out what is happening,” senior researcher Nancy McElwain, a research professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in a news release.

Results showed that babies tested at 6, 9 and 12 months old all stared longer at the sight of a woman ignoring a crying infant.

“They are surprised, because there’s a violation of expectations,” McElwain said. “In the same way infants show surprise when an object defies a law of physics — such as floating in the air or moving through solid surfaces — they expect a caregiver not to ignore a crying baby.”

For the same study, the mothers of the children filled out a questionnaire designed to assess their depressive symptoms.

Babies with depressed mothers demonstrated less surprise that the woman didn’t comfort a crying baby, suggesting that their mom’s behavior had diminished their expectations of comfort, researchers said.

“At each time point, more depressive symptoms reported by mothers were associated with their infants’ lower expectations about comforting behaviors,” Hu said.

Depressed mothers are less likely to respond to crying, causing babies to expect less care from any grown-up, researchers said.

“It’s plausible that most infants, from very early in life, hold nascent positive expectations for interpersonal interactions, including that a caregiver will comfort a crying baby,” McElwain said. “But over time, those expectations can shift.”

However, it’s also possible that infants with depressed mothers might behave differently when in new environments like a laboratory, and that might affect the results.

Future studies are needed to further explore the potential link between a mom’s depression and its role in shaping what infants expect from their caregivers, researchers concluded.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has positive parenting tips.

SOURCE: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, news release, Sept. 10, 2026