While babies aren’t afraid to make their needs abundantly clear, it can often be hard to determine the reason behind some of their more baffling displays of anguish.
Case in point – one mum recently took to Reddit to share how her baby had taken a serious dislike to her mother-in-law.
“She was OK with her when she was a newborn, but the last few times we’ve visited the in-laws something has triggered her and she’s been hysterical and inconsolable until we got home,” wrote the baffled parent.
“We thought it was some stranger danger-type phase or that she didn’t like new or noisy places... it seemed like she was accepting of my father-in-law, but not my mother-in-law.”
This belief was cemented further when her mother-in-law arrived at their house to babysit for half an hour, and the five-month-old baby burst into tears as soon as she walked through the door.
The tiny tot wasn’t able to calm down again until after her grandmother had left.
“My MIL [mother-in-law] is a very loving kind person, she doesn’t talk loudly or have any strong perfume or features,” explained the confused parent.
“She watched my baby once for a few hours when she was three months old and when I picked her up she was crying but we put that down to hunger – I can’t imagine anything untoward would have happened while I was away.”
The parent added her mother-in-law is “absolutely heartbroken” over the baby’s sudden dislike of her, and asked if anyone else had experienced something similar.
There might be several reasons why little ones take a dislike to family members or friends, Dr Kalanit Ben-Ari, a family therapist who founded the parenting platform Get The Village, previously told HuffPost UK.
In some instances, a baby might sense a parent’s anxiety or stress around a particular person and react to it, she said.
It might also be that once that person holds the baby, the child loses touch with the parents and becomes stressed, leading to fear of separation anxiety that is associated with the person.
“The problem is that when a parent anticipates the baby’s stressful reaction, the baby becomes more stressed, so it is a cycle or reaction that starts to be associated with that person,” said Dr Ben-Ari.
Sometimes children might have a sensory reaction to a family member that isn’t positive. For example, they might take a dislike to a different voice, accent, smell or even appearance like if they wear glasses or keep their shoes on in the house.
In the comments section of the Reddit post, some parents suggested it might be a smell related to the mother-in-law that was causing the baby to be so upset.
One parent wrote: “My daughter, and I, are very sensitive to smells, so my daughter went through a phase where she hated my MIL [mother-in-law], but not my FIL [father-in-law]. and it wasn’t all the time. We figured out it was the perfumed lotion she was using.”
“This was my first thought too,” another added. “The first time my parents visited my LO [little one] was inconsolable even after they’d left.
“It was only when my husband tried to soothe him and commented how he smells like my mum that we clicked it could be that. Changed his clothes and he went straight to sleep.”
In very rare instances, a child might react badly to someone because they’ve been abused physically, emotionally or sexually by that person, said Fiona Yassin, family psychotherapist and founder and clinical director of The Wave Clinic.
“Parents have a wonderful intuition and can often sense or feel when something is wrong with their child,” she said.
If you ever suspect this, Yassin urges parents not to take matters into their own hands and to instead get professional support as quickly as possible.