This is not much of a surprise to me.
What interests me more, is how people/parents react to that behavior.
It’s pretty hard to ignore a crying 6 month old baby.
In “the baby whisperer”, Tracy Hogg describes how you can recognize the different kind of crying your child does. Once you can distinguish the “cry for food”, from the “I’m bored cry” it become possible to react in the appropriate way.
The situation also helps:
Last year when we went on holiday, our 2 year old was sleeping 50cm away from me. When he was crying at night, I could not let him cry for 1 minute. I tried multiple times, but when a child cries and you hear it that good, some instinct pops up you can not ignore. As a result it was very hard to get him back to sleep.
At home he sleeps in another room, there it possible to let him cry for 5 minutes. Most of he time he goes sleeping again after less then 3 minutes.
All the cry-babies(huilbabies)I know sleep in the room of their parents. I’m not saying that all these babies would not be cry babies if they weren’t. But I am convinced that for some of them, it would help if they sleep in another room. It’s just impossible to ignore a crying baby sleeping 50 cm away from you. And then you learn the child: “when you cry, I give you attention”
Who would not want that?
We should have a similar investigation, on leaders/managers and team members.
Maybe the reason why we have cry-babies in a team is because they are taught that is the way you get some attention.
Some of these people learned that at home. Others on the workfloor.