LOST IN TRANSLATION HOW TO FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT YOUR BABY IS TRYING TO TELL YOU.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

It's a sunny day at Santa Monica Beach, and Robert and Karen Baird of Sherman Oaks are enjoying the fruits of good communication skills with their baby daughter, Paige.

The 7-month-old, dressed in an adorable pink outfit, makes an ever-so- slight noise - more a call than a cry - when dad doesn't pay complete attention to her. Robert Baird responds, knowing immediately what she wants, by turning her toward him. Paige smiles, reaching out to touch his nose and glasses. She's clearly delighted.

But understanding her needs wasn't always so easy for the first-time parents, both 33. Those first few months, when Paige cried a lot, the Bairds could only guess what she wanted through a process of elimination.

``Once you eliminate all the major things, like if you know she had enough sleep and clean diapers, you can narrow it down,'' says Karen Baird. ``It was very rare she was crying for a reason we could immediately understand.''

Trying to decode a baby's cries can be a frustrating challenge for parents. But with a little patience and understanding, say baby experts, parents can learn to tell the difference between those squalls, shrieks and screams.

At the start, process of elimination is the only way to tell what a baby wants when she cries. Parents quickly learn to check whether their baby is hungry, sleepy or in obvious physical pain. Before long, parents should be able to ``read'' the cries of a baby by instinct, as well as from experience.

``You'll quickly get the hang of translating those different cries,'' says Heidi Murkoff, author of ``What to Expect When You're Expecting.''

``Mind you, you won't always get it right on the first try - and if you have a colicky baby on your hands, you may try, try, try and baby will still cry, cry, cry.

``(But) you'll feed a hungry baby,'' she continues. ``Hopefully, you'll tune into hunger cues like lip smacking, or rooting, or finger sucking before crying - which makes feeding difficult - begins in earnest. You'll console a baby in pain, play with a baby who's just plain bored, rock or otherwise soothe a baby who's overtired, and so on.''

``Comforting Your Crying Baby'' author Sandy Jones says one solution may be to understand what life was like for the baby in the womb.

``The most powerful soothers are the ones that mimic what babies knew inside the womb. Anything that says 'home' has a soothing effect.''

For instance, swaddling a baby can calm him, since temperatures in the ``real world'' are 20 degrees cooler than the womb. Also calming is the static white noise of an off-the-air radio station or the hum of a vacuum cleaner. Those sounds are reminiscent of a heartbeat or the pumping liquids inside a body.

``And the most effective motions move a baby in a back-and-forth way, comparable to movement during pregnancy,'' Jones says. She adds that the mere presence of mom can be calming, since an infant recognizes her voice from in-utero and will turn toward it.

Whatever method a parent tries to stop a baby's crying, do it long enough so that it becomes ``boring'' for the infant, advises Jones; the repetition has a lulling effect.

``What happens is an inexperienced parent panics when baby is unhappy and will try all sorts of efforts to get baby to stop crying,'' she says.

Even when the source of crying befuddles a parent, the baby's demands for attention need to be addressed. Routinely neglecting a crying infant can harm the baby's emotional and physical well-being.

Dr. Barbara Korsch, a professor of pediatrics at USC's Keck School of Medicine and attending pediatrician at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, cites studies by psychiatrist Rene Spitz on the hazards of overlooking such cries.

``If you put babies in an institution, meticulous from a scientific point of view - clean, good hygiene, babies fed appropriate amounts of calories, vitamins - (where they) were lined up in cribs in large halls covered with sheets so they didn't see anything and nobody interacted with them in a non-task-oriented way, (they) wasted away,'' she says.

``Communication with the outside world is terribly important,'' Korsch cautions. ``And that goes both ways. The Spitz babies in the beginning cried because they were lonely and unhappy. In a few weeks they learned it was no use - nobody was listening. So they stopped crying - it's called anaclitic depression.''

Once babies learn to communicate in ways other than crying, parents will have an easier time understanding their children's needs. Jones says that process can start to happen somewhere in the 4-to-6-month range.

``Baby will begin to smile at you as a social gesture,'' she says. ``Once that interaction begins, where baby smiles and parents smile back, some wonderful communication begins. You can get a wonderful chortle or gurgle when you comb baby's hair, which encourages the parents to do more. There's an elegant social-interaction system built into babies and parents.''

Korsch says babies then also start to make their intentions known.

``As the baby goes through the first year, he develops gestures that have specific meanings,'' she says. ``He raises both arms and hopes to be picked up, and things like that. They do some adaptive, nonverbal things. If too tightly wrapped and swaddled, they may try to kick and squirm their way out. Or if they're in an uncomfortable position, as soon as they learn to turn, they try to turn. So if someone's watching, they get a signal.''

And as a baby becomes accustomed to his new surroundings and his vision steadily improves, his communication skills will grow, too.

``A 3-month-old watches everything; they may happen to see you,'' says Dr. Harvey Karp, an assistant professor of pediatrics at UCLA School of Medicine as well as a practicing pediatrician and author of ``The Happiest Baby on the Block.''

``At 4 to 5 months, they start to scrutinize. A 6-month-old becomes quite attentive to watching eyebrows, smiles and expressions on your face. A 9-month-old not only can tell when you're happy and sad but can even come over and stroke you when you're upset.

``That's when you start to get nonverbal communication. Words are gobbledygook, but when we speak to them in high-pitched 'mommy-speak' - singsongy - it's very soothing to them.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Waaah!

Decode your baby's cries

Terri Thuente/Staff Photographer

(2) After a few shaky months, Karen Baird of Sherman Oaks has learned to interpret the cries of 7-month-old Paige.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer

(3) no caption (book: ``What to Expect the First Year'')

Box:

Cracking the crying code

- Reprinted with permission from Workman Publishing. Excerpted from ``What to Expect the First Year,'' by Heidi Murkoff, Arlene Eisenberg and Sandee Hathaway.