During the ‘primal period’, as Michel Odent has called the time of dependent infancy (1986), babies do have very demanding needs. They are demanding because they are continuous, sometimes hard to fathom without the aid of language, and they make no concessions to adult needs. You cannot ask a baby to wait while you make a phone call or finish eating your lunch. Once the wail goes up, there is an urgency to quieten it, which takes precedence over everything. The baby cannot wait because the baby has no concept of time and therefore no capacity to anticipate needs being met in 10 minutes’ time.
