Baby makes weird noise?

[mrs.t]

My almost 5mo DS makes this weird whiny yelling noise. It seems to be when he is frustrated about something, but he also makes this weird facial expression when he does it and it freaks me out. So this leads to my two questions:

1. Can you get a 5 month old to stop making an annoying noise, and if so, how?

2. How do you know what is normal behavior for an infant?

I guess it just bothers me because it seems like when he does this, he stops paying attention to me and gets into this whining zone, and I don't like him not snapping out of it...it kind of scares me. It's probably nothing but as a first time mom everything makes me nervous!

[ErinYay]

This is not what you want to hear, but:

Get used to it! I was amazed that DD could whine so young, but nope, she started it around 5mo, too. And the more mobile she's become, the louder and more spine-tingling it gets! She's almost 9 months now, and she's not a terrible whiner(yet?) and rarely whines in public or with others around (probably bc then she's stimulated enough) but it's still very annoying.

She tends to whine a lot during meals if I'm not feeding her quickly enough. As a former dog trainer, one day last week I decided to try and condition her out of it, so a whine got nothing- no banana, no talking from me, while babbles and quiet got kisses and another spoonful of banana.

It actually worked, and her whining decreased significantly for the rest of the day.

But, alas, I felt *REALLY* bad about it, so I haven't done it since.


eta: It's normal for little ones to start showing some definite "personality" at this age- with little scowls and all. Once they get started on something, they really like to roll with it.