Why Bobby Sherman Cried Like a Baby (And Why Yours Does Too)

Yesterday at my favorite craft coffee spot, the barista handed me my iced Americano and casually mentioned that letting an 11-month-old scream in his stroller builds "diaphragmatic resilience." Two hours later, my mother-in-law texted to warn me that responding to every whimper means I'm currently being manipulated by a creature who literally just learned how to eat a banana without choking on it. Then there's the guy on the parenting subreddit who aggressively swore that the only way to stop a meltdown was to stream a specific frequency of brown noise through a $400 Sonos subwoofer.

I'm a software engineer. When I write code, a syntax error gives me a specific line number. I can track the bug. I can fix the bug. When my son, Leo, screams, I just get a loud, blaring system alarm with zero documentation. So, like any sleep-deprived millennial dad running on three hours of sleep and an analytical compulsion to map data, I took to Google to figure out how to debug a baby.

And somehow, my frantic midnight search history led me away from pediatric medical journals and straight into the arms of a 1971 pop idol.

The weird pop culture rabbit hole I fell into at 3 AM

Apparently, when you aggressively search for variations of infant meltdowns and why humans weep, the algorithm occasionally decides you want to learn about Bobby Sherman. If you aren't a boomer, you probably have zero idea who that's. I certainly didn't, but my wife Sarah had to gently ask me why a vintage teen magazine cover was glowing on my laptop screen at three in the morning.

He had a massive hit song literally called "Cried Like a Baby," where he essentially uses infant meltdowns as a metaphor for deep, uncontrollable adult despair. The song is basically a bug report of a wealthy, successful guy who has everything but still weeps helplessly alone in the dark.

I spent entirely too much time reading about this guy while Leo was furiously protesting his crib. The metaphor actually holds up beautifully, because crying like a baby isn't just about volume. It's about a complete inability to control your own system state. You're just crashing, over and over, until someone else restarts you. You don't know why you're mad. You just know that your internal temperature feels wrong and the ambient lighting is offensive.

Funny side note about Sherman: he actually quit being a pop star later in life to become a certified paramedic and a medical training officer for the LAPD. Talk about a career pivot. I can barely pivot from my standing desk to the diaper changing station without pulling a hamstring.

What the pediatrician actually told us about the noise

When Leo was about four weeks old, we dragged him to Dr. Aris because he was screaming from 5 PM to 8 PM every single night with the reliability of a cron job. I had tracked his exact crying durations, diaper output, and ambient room temperatures in a spreadsheet, fully prepared to present the data like a Q3 earnings report.

Dr. Aris barely glanced at my beautifully formatted pivot tables. He just sighed, looked at my dark circles, and mumbled something about the "Period of PURPLE Crying," which is an acronym that I still don't fully understand despite googling it twice a week. Apparently, healthy babies just go through this phase where their nervous system is running on an unpatched, highly unstable beta version of firmware, and they just cry. For hours. It's not a bug. It's just a terrifying feature of early childhood development.

I tried to ask if we should just leave him in his crib to "figure it out" like the barista implied, but Dr. Aris shot that down. He mentioned something about cortisol levels spiking and stress hormones flooding their tiny bodies if we just let them scream into the void, which sounds like incredibly bad news for his developing hard drive. So, we had to intervene. Every time.

Hardware solutions for unhandled exceptions

When the internal software is failing, my immediate instinct is to throw hardware at the problem. Or at least, accessories.

I'm going to be completely honest here: during the teething phase a few months ago, Leo's crying reached a whole new, piercing decibel level. He was gnawing on my Apple Watch band, the edge of the coffee table, and occasionally the dog's tail. Out of sheer desperation, I bought the Dinosaur Baby Teether from Kianao at 3 AM. I'm usually highly skeptical of anything shaped like a dinosaur that claims to solve my life problems, but this thing honestly works. It has these little textured spikes on the back that apparently hit exactly the right corrupted sector on his gums. He just sits there furiously chewing it while maintaining unbroken, intense eye contact with me. It's a little unnerving, but it stops the screaming instantly.

We also bought the Wooden Baby Gym with the little animal toys. It's fine. It looks great in our living room, way better than the neon plastic monstrosities that look like a carnival exploded, and it kept him distracted for exactly seven minutes at a time when he was smaller. Now that he's 11 months old, he mostly just wants to rip the wooden elephant off the frame and hit the floor with it to see what kind of acoustic resonance he can generate.

The absolute chaos of the five soothing methods

Everyone online tells you to use the "5 Ss" to stop a baby from crying, which is great in theory until you're honestly trying to execute them while running on fumes.

Swaddling is essentially just zip-tying their flailing limbs so they don't punch themselves in the face while they sleep.

But the "Suck" reflex? This is the one that destroys me on a deeply personal level. The concept is that giving them a pacifier or something to chew on triggers a calming mechanism in their brain. It's like pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete on a tantrum. Sounds brilliant.

Except it requires the object to genuinely stay in the mouth. When Leo was younger, he would aggressively spit his pacifier out, immediately realize his mistake, and then scream because his soothing device had vanished. This cycle would repeat roughly 400 times a night. I spent weeks acting as a human pacifier-retrieval mechanism, hunched over the bassinet in the dark, blindly feeling around the mattress.

Even now, he does it with his teethers. He'll drop his Squirrel Teether onto the rug, stare at it like it profoundly betrayed him, and wail until I pick it up, only for him to immediately hurl it back onto the floor. It's a cruel, never-ending physics experiment.

In fact, the only thing that somewhat bypasses the madness of those rigid soothing steps is just wrapping him tightly in his Organic Cotton Baby Blanket with Polar Bear Print, doing a weird, frantic combination of violently whispering 'shhh' like a deranged librarian while swaying at a 45-degree angle that defies gravity until he finally powers down.

If you're currently dealing with a tiny human who cries louder than a dial-up modem connecting to the mainframe, you might want to casually browse Kianao's organic cotton essentials and playtime gear before you completely lose your mind.

When you need to reboot your own operating system

There was one night, right around month two, where the screaming was so loud and so relentless that my vision really started to blur at the edges. I felt this massive spike of pure, unfiltered panic, like I had deleted the production database and had no backups.

Apparently, it's completely standard medical advice to just put the baby safely in the crib, walk out of the room, and close the door for ten minutes. I didn't believe it at first. I thought it meant I was failing the fatherhood test. But Sarah told me to go stand on the porch and breathe the freezing Portland rain for five minutes.

It's a system reset. You can't debug an application if your own terminal is frozen. Taking a time-out doesn't mean you're abandoning them; it just means you're actively preventing a catastrophic hardware failure in yourself. So I stood outside, watched a local raccoon eat half a pizza out of our compost bin, let my heart rate drop below 120, and went back inside.

Look, if you're holding a screaming infant right now and reading this with one eye open, put them down safely, take a breath, and go drink a glass of water. And when you're ready to upgrade your troubleshooting toolkit to deal with the next inevitable meltdown, check out Kianao's collection of safe, sustainable baby gear.

Messy questions I googled at 4 AM

Why does he instantly start crying the second I sit down?

I'm convinced babies have a highly calibrated internal gyroscope. The moment my glutes make contact with the sofa cushion, Leo's alarm sounds. Apparently, this is an evolutionary trait where infants feel safer when the caregiver is in motion, mimicking the womb. But honestly, it just feels like he's trying to close my Apple Watch stand ring by force.

Are we spoiling him if we pick him up every single time?

My mother-in-law insists we're building a tyrant. But Dr. Aris said you literally can't spoil a baby in the first six months. Their brains aren't developed enough to manipulate you; they just have a need and are screaming to get it met. I try to remind myself of this when I'm carrying him around the kitchen for the 14th time in an hour.

How long does the PURPLE crying phase seriously last?

The books say it peaks around two months and fades by three to four months. In my experience, it doesn't so much end as it just morphs into new, highly specific complaints. At 11 months, he doesn't cry for hours for no reason anymore. Now he just cries because I won't let him eat the television remote.

What if literally nothing works and he won't stop crying?

If you've checked the diaper, the temperature, and the feeding schedule, and you've tried the bouncing and the teethers, sometimes you just have to ride it out. Put on noise-canceling headphones. Seriously. It dampens the piercing frequency so you can still hold them and comfort them without your own nervous system completely short-circuiting.

Is it normal that I want to cry too?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure Bobby Sherman was right about that part. Sometimes you just have to sit in the dark and let the system crash for a minute before you reboot.