"Fake" Crying
you're so dramaaaaatic
It is intensely distressing to witness your child scream crying in distress, as Kiko did for a few hours on that hellish 10.5 hour flight to California. Biological instinct to fix the extremely loud signal that something is not right — her body temperature, her hunger levels — and that baby must be saved from imminent death kicks in hard.
But babies cry not only when they’re in actual physical discomfort, but also as a mode of communication. As much as Kiko has developed in a year (her birthday was celebrated a few days ago with a smash cake and a visit to a Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely sculpture), her language skills remain limited to making noises that sound distinctly French, e.g., farting with her mouth.
Yet the control she’s gained over her body in the past few months is impressive: she spider crawls, can point in any which direction, giggle, laugh, scream, and cry on command.
Hersonality contains a certain determination about food: when she likes something, she eats vigorously, craning her neck to get closer to each bite. When she doesn’t get her food fast enough, she’ll start crying to communicate her displeasure.
Her dad will laugh, proclaiming, Tu fais ton cinema, tu fais ton cinemaaaaa (translation: you’re acting, you’re aaacting!) If I put Kiko into her playpen (a rare occurrence nowadays, given the following reaction), she’ll immediately scrunch up her tiny face and wail until real tears slide down her fat cheeks or until someone comes to relieve her from her prison. When this show of emotion occurs around family members or adults, people are quick to call out this is “fake tears” or “fake crying.” I myself have have called her a drama queen and made this distinction, but I’ve been wondering if it’s a good thing.
So much of my parenthood experience has been observing the knee-jerk reactions and responses to children and trying to figure out why, where and how we label kids behavior. While I’m certainly not the first to point out that viewing a baby’s very real tears as deceptive isn’t the best idea, or that a baby likely doesn’t have a manipulative motive to intentionally con their parents, our adult tendency to quickly label tears that aren’t linked to a physical discomfort as “fake” intrigues me. It says a lot about our society and what we deem acceptable or even “real”. Tears born of a physical reality, in this case, hunger or pain, are understandable and met with empathy and care. Tears that fall because of an emotion and of abstract desire are met with derision, or this idea that the tears are manufactured or less than.
Obviously, adults do cry from emotional pain, but the most socially acceptable causes for wet displays of emotional pain are linked to ruptures in reality; death, the loss of a relationship, a promotion at work gone horribly wrong. Of course, growing mental health awareness movement lets more and more people people know it’s okay to cry. Adults can cry like a baby, but it’s rarer for an adult to be able to cry on command like a baby can. But skilled actors, like babies, can quickly go from smiling and laughing to teary-eyed the next. People marvel at this skill, and also pay good money to go to the movies or stream Netflix to watch people make believe to escape to a fantasy world. People want to feel something, or to feel moved. I think we are all born with this capacity for drama and make-believe to transform any situation, but then we are shamed out of this fluidity. We’re told that our tears are fake, and that only the tangible, measurable world matters. We permit ourselves to cry in only certain circumstances, and then slowly, most of us lose that control we have over our own selves and bodies.
The real/fake crying distinction is an interesting one. My guess is the distinction mainly has to do with whether the crying is automatic/uncontrolled or is instead willed, with the thought being that automatic/uncontrolled crying is more likely to be expressive of a more intense emotion or need. Kind of like how a smile is "fake" if someone is happy but this happiness wasn't strong enough to automatically register with a smile, so the happy person had to intentionally shift their facial muscles to express their happiness through their face.
Crying is "real" whenever it is uncontrolled, no matter what prompts the crying—whether it be physical pain or a thwarted desire or an emotion. Crying is "fake" when the screams or tears are an intentional choice—no matter what inspires someone to choose to express themselves by crying. It may be that the fake crier is upset about something that normally elicits automatic tears but for some reason didn't in this case, like an intense pain, so they decide to cry in order to express that they are feeling something that would normally cause them to cry.
It is interesting that "fake" crying can be dismissed or laughed away even when it can be an expression of a feeling that is bad enough to normally inspire "real" crying. My sense is we think that because the crying is not automatic, the experience it's expressing must not be as bad as an experience that inspires automatic uncontrolled crying, or that the need it is expressing is not as great as a need that inspires uncontrolled tears. I guess children are often in a battle for attention and care which is sometimes in conflict with parents' needs for their own care. Children figure out that their needs are more eagerly attended to when they cry, and that their needs which are not combined with crying are more likely to be ignored when their parents have competing concerns. So, if a child's need does not inspire automatic crying, they might choose to cry while expressing this need in order to boost the chances of having their needs addressed
"Fake" crying can be an expression of a real need or desire on the part of the child, but parents who determine the crying is fake will sometimes dismiss such crying as an attempted power grab: an exaggeration of a need that is real, but maybe is not really as pressing as other things the parents feel they need to attend to. If the crying were "real," it could be about a major problem the parents must attend to immediately no matter what else they have going on. If the crying is "fake," it's more likely to be a minor issue that the parents can ignore for now if they have something else they have to do
(Just some speculations from a non-parent.)