In his defense, you'd probably be crying for help too if you were stuck Floating in a Bubble.
But what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.
Babies cry. It's a reality of babyhood. But this trope arises when the baby or child just won't stop crying, Played for Drama and/or Played for Horror. No matter what the parent does, the child just keeps howling without let-up.
This is the dramatic counterpart of Getting the Baby to Sleep, and it could overlap with Woken Up at an Ungodly Hour if the crying is at night. In contrast to the comedy generated by that trope, though, this trope focuses on the Sleep Deprivation, the embarrassment, the judgement from other people (including and perhaps especially other parents), the isolation, and the Sanity Slippage. The colic (prolonged crying) may be one explanation for why a woman is Maternally Challenged, or why a relationship might break down after the birth of a child (in an inversion of Babies Make Everything Better). At its darkest, this could be one reason for physically abusing the child, or Offing the Offspring.
This trope is Truth in Television. Children do cry, sometimes for inexplicable reasons (colic), and sometimes for practical reasons, such as teething. The two extremes, on either end of the spectrum, may be interpreted as a sign of child abuse or of an Enfant Terrible, who is purposefully crying to aggravate their hapless parents (especially among older children).
Related to Screaming Plane Baby. However, that one is usually about being trapped with a baby for a limited but intense period, and is most often told from the perspective of the outsiders trapped with the child, whereas this is usually told from the parent or parents' perspective.
A subtrope of Cute, but Cacophonic (though usually much more stressful) and of Prone to Tears.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Doki Doki! PreCure: In episode 8, Ai-chan annoys all the customers in the store with her crying and only calms down when she bites Lance's ear. Later, she starts wailing again, so the girls try to calm her down. Mana in particular sings off-key, which just makes Ai-chan cry more.
- HuGtto! Pretty Cure: In episode 3, Hugtan has been wailing a lot, and Harry says she's kept him awake all night. Saaya suspects that Hugtan's probably been fussy because she's not used to this new environment, so they take her to a garden and a petting zoo. A businessman then complains about how irritating her wailing is when not even that helps.
Fan Works
- Paradoxus: The fic expands on Sylvanas' tormented afterlife. She's introduced just after she was killed by Greymane. The only thing she can hear is a baby version of Arthas endlessly wailing into the void, which her sensitive elven ears make all the harder to bear.
- Patchwork (FFVII):
- At one point, Aerith and Sephiroth's son Briar just begins crying for no apparent reason. After going through everything they can think of that might be upsetting him, Aerith absent-mindedly picks a piece of fluff from his onesie. He immediately stops crying. Incredulous, she puts it back and he starts crying again and stops when she takes it off.
Aerith: All that noise for this?- Later, he starts screaming at all hours of the day. And refusing to eat. Figuring out what's going on is hampered by the fact that they're having a fight at the moment and Aerith is giving Sephiroth the Silent Treatment. It reaches a point that Briar needs to be hospitalized due to dehydration. There it comes out that the cause of it all, the constant crying, not eating, is because of stress induced by his parents' fighting. This forces them to reconcile their differences for the sake of their child.
- In the Pretty Cure fanfic Capturing My Mind
, the Bad End Trio members kidnap Maple, but her wailing drives them insane. They test out ways to quiet her down; Wolfrun tries to play peekaboo (which just scares her), Majorina sings horribly off-key (which, again, makes her scream even more), and Akaoni throws white things (as Majorina had suggested quieting her down with white noise and he took it literally). By the time Nagisa and Honoka show up, they practically beg them to take Maple off their hands so they don't have to endure her caterwauling anymore.
Film — Animated
- Ice Age (2002): At one point, Roshan starts wailing for what is implied to be quite a while, so Manny complains to Sid about it. Diego even says he's eaten creatures that didn't whine as much. Manny suspects that Roshan needs his diaper changed, but he turns out to just be hungry.
- Robots: At the beginning, when we see Rodney as a baby, his father Herb hammers what is heavily implied to be a penis onto him and Rodney wails non-stop. Herb tries to calm him down by doing the "got your nose" trick, only to actually pull his nose off and he continues bawling. Herb then notices a volume knob and sets Rodney's volume setting to silent, which finally quiets him down.
- The Rugrats Movie: When Dil is born, one of the reasons the other kids dislike him is that he cries too much. It's even said that he hasn't stopped wailing since he was brought home several days ago.
Film — Live-Action
- Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: When Trevor's pacifier gets disposed of by mistake, he bawls all night, so Emily has no choice but to rehearse her lines in a cold car, resulting in her getting sick. Their parents stay up all night trying to quiet him down, and they end up getting to work late.
- Brassed Off: Phil’s baby daughter Kylie is heard crying almost every time she is shown, highlighting his family’s stress in dealing with four children in poverty, especially when Phil has to take them all out to the band parade, without his wife.
- Eraserhead: Henry and Mary's new "baby" is almost constantly crying in a warped, unnatural voice. It's so aggravating that it forces Mary to move back in with her family, leaving poor Henry alone to care for the misbegotten thing.
- The Fantastic Four: First Steps: Franklin Richards starts bawling when he sees Sue's dead body after she overexerted herself to defeat Galactus. At least until he brings her Back from the Dead.
- Joshua: The birth of baby Lily is the Inciting Incident. Though Abby is initially much happier with Lily than she was with her firstborn son, Joshua, soon Lily starts to cry hysterically every single night and cannot be reassured no matter what. The sound slowly drives Abby to madness and gets her institutionalized. Brad learns late in the film that Joshua is presumably responsible, after he records himself hurting Lily every single night, causing her to cry.
- Labyrinth: Toby, Sarah's baby half-brother, has colic and continuously cries. It's especially bad at the start of the movie, when he starts bawling after their parents leave for a night out. Sarah, who was already in a bad mood after a fight with her stepmother and learning that her favorite stuffed toy was used to entertain the baby without her permission, is further stressed out by the baby's screaming, to the point that she wishes the Goblin King's minions would kidnap the baby, kicking off the plot of the film.
- Magpie: Anette is stuck at home with their baby son, Lucas, who cries almost all the time, while Ben goes to set with Tilly and contemplates cheating on her with Alicia. Multiple scenes intersect the sight of Anette struggling to care for Lucas in contrast to Ben's fulfilling days on set.
- Maleficent: When Aurora (under the name "Rose") is taken as a baby to be raised by the Good Fairies, it quickly becomes clear the fairies have no idea how to actually care for a human child. Poor baby Aurora isn't fed for her first day with the fairies, and cries the whole day and into the night. Maleficent, annoyed at the constant crying, sends Diaval into the baby's room with a flower full of milk. This finally gets Aurora to stop crying.
- Polish Wedding: Ziggy and Sophie's newborn son constantly cries through most of the movie, causing stress for the entire family even when his aunt Hala tries to comfort him in the middle of the night.
- Tootsie: Michael, in his Dorothy Michaels persona, is babysitting his colleague Julie's daughter Amy. "Dorothy" says aloud something about how hard a baby can be. Cut to a montage of scenes of Dorothy trying to calm down Amy, even getting food thrown in. By the time Amy is calmed down, Dorothy is sitting on the floor snoring.
- The Untouchables (1987): The film's iconic Odessa Steps sequence is built up to with Eliot Ness and his crew trying to ambush some gangsters in Union Terminal, with the tension buildup visually represented by a woman trying to bring a stroller with her screaming baby in it up the long staircase, which goes on for a while.
- We Need to Talk About Kevin: As a baby, Kevin cries continuously. It's such a piercing noise that, at one point, Eva stops at a roaring building site to get some relief.
Folklore
- In European folklore, a baby crying inconsolably was believed to be an indicator that it was a Changeling, left by The Fair Folk in the place of an abducted baby.
Literature
- Adrian Mole: In Secret Diary, Adrian finds himself having to babysit Doreen's baby son Maxwell, who screams most of the time. When Pandora telephones to offer support, she suggests putting vodka in hot milk and forcing it down his vile throat. After doing this, Adrian writes "he is not a bad kid when he is asleep."
- Alfie: The sub-plot of "An Evening at Alfie's" is Maureen the babysitter trying to cheer up Annie Rose, who is about a year old, and crying. To make matters worse, it's nighttime, and the roof is leaking (which is the main plot).
- Arthur: In the book Arthur's Baby, Jane is pregnant and Binky warns Arthur that if he doesn't get earplugs, the baby will keep him up all night with its wailing. At the end, Kate starts crying after drinking from a bottle, and DW tries in vain to calm her down. She asks Arthur for help, and he burps Kate, finally quieting her down.
- Break: Jonah's spree of violent self-harm (breaking his bones) starts with the birth of his baby brother, Will, six months earlier, who cries all the time, preventing anyone from getting any sleep and raising the stress levels in the house.
- In the book Little Tiger's Big Surprise, Little Tiger finds Little Rhino taking a nap and asks her why she's sleeping in the middle of the day. She reveals that her baby sister cries all night and keeps her awake. Little Tiger only becomes even more worried about having a new sibling since he dreads all the changes that come with it.
- Sesame Street:
- In the book Grover Learns to Read, Betty Lou has Grover look after her baby sister while she goes to return a library book. Her baby sister starts bawling, so Grover makes funny faces to silence her, but she won't stop shrieking. He then quiets her down by reading her a story.
- In the book A Baby Sister for Herry, one of the things Herry dislikes about his baby sister is the fact that she cries a lot; he notes that it gives him a headache. He also hates that her wailing disrupts his puzzles with his father.
- We Need to Talk About Kevin: Kevin cries so relentlessly that, at one point, Eva hires a nanny to help her with the noise. The nanny, Siobhan, adores children, but after a few weeks of Kevin's hysterical wailing, she changes her mind and tells Eva that she no longer wants to have children. Even through to his toddlerhood, he screams and throws horrendous tantrums.
Live-Action TV
- Captain Mac: In one episode, the main characters call the eponymous action hero just because Oscar, the Mayor's baby nephew they're babysitting, won't stop crying.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The episode "Shaken" revolves around 1-year-old Lucy Prichard, who is found almost brain-dead in a park. It's revealed that Lucy is a very difficult child who is known for crying for very long periods of time and throwing tantrums. Exhausted and at the end of her rope by Lucy's crying, her Struggling Single Mother Evelyn shook her and caused severe brain damage which ultimately killed her.
She was a colicky baby, and now she's a screamer.
- M*A*S*H: It's revealed Hawkeye has PTSD from the time he hissed at a Korean mother to keep her baby quiet to avoid being heard by the enemy, and she complied by smothering the baby.
- Mr. Bean: In the final scene of "Mind the Baby, Mr Bean", the baby is screaming piercingly, and poor Mr Bean tries everything to calm the baby: dancing and singing, and pleading with the baby to stop crying. Finally he buys a balloon from a nearby seller, and then buys the seller's entire stock of balloons. This does stop the baby crying.
- The Pitt (2025): In episode 4, a mother brings in her baby who won't stop crying; Drs. Mohan & King diagnose a hair tourniquet (Truth in Television).
- Sesame Street:
- In one episode, Maria and Zoe look after Natasha while her parents are on a trip. Natasha bawls endlessly and keeps saying "Hoongie!", so Zoe and Maria try to find the meaning of the word. It turns out to be the name of her doll, which her parents accidentally brought with them.
- In another episode, a woman tries to quiet down her baby Rocky when he's wailing. His older sister Roberta even asks if crying is all he knows how to do, and the second they leave the room, he has an entire song about how he's always crying, typically to get what he wants.
- Stargate Atlantis: In "Prodigal Son", Teyla is seen walking Atlantis trying to get baby Torren to sleep. When she tells Sheppard and McKay the baby has colic, Rodney shares another anecdote from his Hilariously Abusive Childhood.
McKay: Don't worry about it. I was a colicky baby too. Just do what my mum did, which is let me cry myself to sleep. I'm no worse for it![John and Teyla exchange looks]
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
- In the subplot of one episode, O'Brien is frustrated with his baby son Yoshi crying all the time unless he's either A.) being carried, or B.) asleep. O'Brien notes that he can't work if he has to carry Yoshi whenever he's awake, and he even has Dr. Bashir examine Yoshi, wondering if some ailment is causing the crying, but Bashir concludes that Yoshi isn't sick, just fussy.
- In "Time's Orphan", Worf and Dax babysit baby Yoshi, who again won't stop crying, even though he's not hungry and doesn't need a diaper change. Worf in particular is worried about his inability to cheer Yoshi up, since he fears he'd be a bad father if he and Dax ever had kids.
- There She Goes: Justified, as Rosie has a severe chromosomal disorder that renders her The Speechless and means that her crying and tantrums are the only way that she can communicate with things that overwhelm or upset her. It's suggested that she loves the letter X because seeing it in the quiet room was one of the first things that calmed her down. However, she has frequent tantrums at inexplicable times. They're particularly bad in the 2023 special when Rosie starts her period, as she can't express what's happening to her.
Video Games
- The final boss of Bloodborne, the stillborn Eldritch Abomination Mergo, can be faintly heard crying throughout the entire map at several points. She begins about when the player kills the boss Rom the Vacuuous Spider.
- Oddworld: According to Word of God, Abe's lips are stitched together because he cried a lot as a baby, so the Mudokon queen was forced to stitch his mouth shut so that the livestock wouldn't attack him.
- Silent Hills: In PT, the baby in the sink cries hysterically and unbearably on several loops. It's heavily implied that the "baby" is actually the fetus, taken from the mother (possibly Lisa), when she was still pregnant. Then it stops crying... and starts talking.
- Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island: Getting hit by an enemy will cause baby Mario to go flying off Yoshi's back, and he'll begin crying constantly until Yoshi is able to retrieve him. This feature was added because during playtesting, players were allowing Mario to float around to see how close they could get before losing him, so Miyamoto added in the most annoying crying possible to encourage players to get Mario back immediately.
- Tomodachi Life: Sometimes two Miis will ask the player to deal with their baby, who won't stop wailing. The player can try to soothe the baby by playing peekaboo or rocking it.
Webcomics
- Oglaf: Justified in "Changeling". The reason why the Changeling child is crying so much is specifically because he doesn't like being made to live with humans.
Websites
- Not Always Learning: In "Hammering Home the Lesson," the submitter's home economics class has to take care of realistic baby dolls, which start crying at random intervals. One student gets so annoyed with his constantly crying doll that he and his dad smash it with a hammer until it stops.
Western Animation
- Arthur:
- In "Arthur's Baby", Kate is wailing a lot, and DW tries to quiet her down despite the fact that she clearly doesn't know what she's doing. Arthur then pats Kate on the back and she burps, which makes her feel better.
- In "D.W.'s Baby", D.W. is at first excited to have baby Kate move into her room, but Kate's loud, non-stop crying is soon keeping her awake all night and driving her crazy. By the third night, D.W. is staring at the ceiling with bloodshot eyes while ominous music plays and Kate continues to cry.
- BoJack Horseman: In "Time's Arrow", baby Bojack being inconsolable and crying all night was the beginning of the deterioration of Beatrice and Butterscotch's marriage.
- The Boss Baby: Back in Business: In "The Constipation Situation", this trope is invoked when Bootsy Calico has his cats mimic the sounds of babies wailing to annoy all the neighbors so that the popularity of babies will be decreased.
- Captain Flamingo: In "Switch Hitch", Tabitha couldn't concentrate on the stuff she has to do since her baby brother Tucker is crying nonstop, so she calls the Captain (this time with Wendell dressed as him, due to him and Milo deciding to switch lives for a day) to help in order to calm him down. However, he didn't really understand how to help the kid or using the right item from Milo's Power Pack due to being unfamiliar with his skills as a superhero. Despite this, he did manage to find a rubber chicken from the backpack, which effectively calms her brother down.
- King of the Hill: In "Peggy Hill: The Decline and Fall", Cotton and Didi's newborn son G.H. cries nonstop and is ignored by his parents because the former is neglectful and the latter is suffering from postpartum depression. Bobby takes up the responsibility taking care of G.H until he finally snaps when the baby's parents have their own concerns. The baby finally calms down when Peggy, who is in a full body cast from a skydiving accident, rocks his carrier with her toes.
- Littlest Pet Shop (2012): In "Spendthrifty", the pets are tasked with looking after a realistic baby doll named Sweetest Sweetsie who turns red and bawls high-pressure tears that are enough to knock them all away every few seconds. By the end of it, they're in over their heads.
- The Looney Tunes Show: In "That's My Baby," Daffy is roped into taking care of his girlfriend's infant cousin, Zachary, only for the baby to cry endlessly while Daffy pathetically attempts to cheer him up with guitar strumming. Zachary only calms down once a television commercial shows advertising a movie about singing whales, only for Daffy to misinterpret this and just take the kid to a violent war movie he's already seen; unsurprisingly, this sends Zachary back into tears.
- The Loud House: At the start of "The Crying Dame", the Loud siblings are tormented by their baby sister Lily's nonstop bawling, and they can't figure out why she's doing this. Their parents point out that babies cry for no reason sometimes, and Lily is finally soothed when she gets her hands on Fenton the Feel-Better Fox, but this just opens another can of worms when she keeps playing his song over and over again.
- Peppa Pig: Peppa and George's baby cousin Alexander is notorious among the family for his ear-splitting wailing. In "Baby Alexander", Peppa is not excited about him coming to visit because of how much he cries. "The Noisy Night" also makes this a plot point when Alexander keeps waking everyone up in the middle of the night with his bawling, so the others try to find ways to quiet him down.
- The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "That's Not My Baby", the Powerpuff Girls find a missing baby. At one point, he wails throughout most of the night, much to their dismay, until Bubbles silences him with some milk (which happens to have ground-up veggie burger inside it, causing him to burp loudly). Later, he keeps them up again, and they are finally fed up with his bawling, so they opt to leave him in a basket on someone's doorstep until they find his mother, who turns out to be a monster.
- Rugrats:
- In "Ruthless Tommy", two Stupid Crooks kidnap Tommy and are driven crazy by his constant crying. They keep trying to quiet him down with a banana, to no avail. This, along with him trashing their hideout, convinces them that keeping him around is more trouble than it's worth and they return him to his family.
- In "A Dose of Dil", the adults are at their wits' end because the children (with the exception of Tommy) are being very needy. Dil's problem is that he won't stop crying because of a painful booster shot.
- In "The Big House", this trope is invoked with Morgan, better known by his nickname of Crybaby. He gets this name from the fact that he constantly pretends to cry to get attention from the adults at the daycare.
- The Simpsons: "The Frying Game" introduces us to the screamapillar: an insect that requires constant reassurance or it will scream and cry itself to death. The only thing that keeps it from being put out of its misery (and everyone else's) is the fact that it's an endangered species.
- Sonic Boom: In "Three Men and My Baby!", Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles are tasked with babysitting Chumley, the infant son of Lady Walrus, after Knuckles causes an accident that leaves her injured. Chumley starts crying when they look after him, so they feed him a blended chili dog, figuring he's hungry. Unfortunately, he poops his diaper shortly afterwards, forcing the three to change it. Even after he's fed and changed, Chumley still continues to cry, so the three put him down for a nap with a mobile (after two failed attempts to sing a lullaby to him). Chumley starts crying again after Dr. Eggman wakes him up to battle Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, who are rightfully angry at Eggman.
- Super Why!: At the start of "Jack and the Beanstalk", Whyatt's baby sister Joy is wailing a lot, and he can't find out how to calm her down. He even says she's having a "huge, giant tantrum" and she briefly turns into a giant. At the end of the episode, he manages to quiet her down with his older brother Jack's guitar.
- Thomas & Friends: In "Thomas the Babysitter", A human baby and his mother board Thomas' train, and the mother is overwhelmed because the baby won't stop crying. The baby calms down and falls asleep every time Thomas' train moves, but starts crying again when the train comes to a stop, much to the disdain of other passengers. This initially gives Thomas the idea not to stop at all, but Annie and Clarabel are horrified at this, reminding him that he has to stop at every signal and crossing gate so all of his passengers will be safe. Near the end, Thomas requests that Sir Topham Hatt miss his break to make a journey without stopping, which Sir Topham Hatt finds a wonderful idea. Sure enough, the journey gives both the baby and his mother some much-needed sleep.
- Toopy and Binoo: In "Diaper Dream", Binoo has an Irritation Nightmare about a baby monster wailing incessantly. Toopy goes inside his dream and tries to feed the baby monster, only for the latter to continue bawling. Then his mother comes in and changes his diaper, which finally silences him.
- Vida the Vet: In "Baby Mouse's Teething Troubles", Sunny and his parents are sleep deprived by Baby Mouse's nonstop bawling and they even have a song about how they've had to stay up all night because of this. Vida then discovers that Baby Mouse is just teething.
Real Life
- Reddit has a few stories about crying babies driving their parents nuts.
- In this post from 2017, a father was asking for advice in r/Parenting because his baby daughter was crying so often and so loudly that he and his family were losing their minds. The neighbors called the police several times suspecting child abuse, the property owner couldn't find another tenant because of the noise, and his wife was seriously considering either leaving the baby at a fire station or divorcing him and taking their older daughter. One thing that helped was holding her while sitting in a warm bath and playing a white noise track.
- In this infamous story, the OP's son (who would grow up to become a violent psychopath) never stopped crying when he was a baby despite all attempts to soothe him, and cried and cried for 13 months straight, up to and including crying in his sleep.
- In this post
- In the US and Canada, some middle/high school health classes assign students to take care of electronic baby dolls for a class project. Supposedly, each classroom set of babies includes a single "meth baby" or "crack baby" which loudly cries all the time to teach students, "This is what you'll have to deal with if you do drugs while pregnant!"
