Speak For Them · a child safeguarding reform campaign
We want preparation for coping with crying and preventing abusive head injury to be a required part of every baby’s placement plan. Every new parent, mother, father or partner, should be offered the same.
First published 8 October 2026 · Updated 12 October 2026 · Speak For Them
It's OK to step away. Put the baby down safely on their back in their cot, close the door, and take a few minutes to calm down. Then go back and check on them. Never shake a baby.
Call Cry-sis on 0800 448 0737, free, 9am to 10pm, seven days a week. The UK charity for parents of babies who cry excessively or won't sleep.
You can also talk to your health visitor, midwife or GP, or call NHS 111. If a baby is hurt, floppy or not responding, call 999.
More on coping with crying: ICON: Babies cry, you can cope.
Crying is normal. Every baby does it, and sometimes nothing will settle them. For a tired carer at three in the morning, it can become too much.
Persistent crying is a known trigger for babies being shaken. Shaking a baby can cause lasting injury, brain damage or death.
The baby cannot ask for help. The adult holding them must be ready.
The government's own national review, The Myth of Invisible Men (Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, 2021), found that harm to babies under one is the biggest category of serious case the Panel sees. It found that men are most often responsible — research cited in the review suggests men are between 2 and 15 times more likely than women to cause this harm to babies under one — and that men are too often invisible to the services meant to support families.
Our ask is specific: every adopter and foster carer of a baby should complete this preparation before placement, or within days of an emergency placement. Every kinship carer should receive it at the point a baby is placed with them. Completion is recorded and followed up.
Preparation must never delay or prevent a placement. A baby should go straight to the family who want them, never into a stopgap foster placement while paperwork catches up. The support arrives alongside the baby, not in the way.
In England and Wales, adoption agencies arrange whatever preparation for adoption the agency considers appropriate, and our proposal would require preparation for coping with a crying baby before placement, or within days in an emergency.
England’s Training, Support and Development standards provide a national induction framework for approved foster carers. They cover health and safety, child development and keeping children safe from harm. Unshaken asks for a specific, recorded preparation step for caring for a baby. Scotland and Wales have learning frameworks that are not mandatory.
In Northern Ireland, official information describes training for foster and kinship foster carers. We are asking for the preparation set out in Unshaken to be made an explicit requirement for every baby placement.
Kinship foster carers are approved as foster carers. Grandparents and other family members taking on the care of a baby should receive practical preparation and support, including when an arrangement is made at short notice. It is given on the day the baby arrives, by the social worker, and repeated at the first visits and health visitor contacts that already happen. It takes minutes, and it must never hold a baby back from family.
In England, Annex C of the Early Years Foundation Stage statutory framework (from September 2026) sets out what safeguarding training must cover. It mentions unexplained bruising in general, but not abusive head trauma, infant crying, that any bruise on a baby who is not yet mobile is a red flag, or how to support a parent or carer who is struggling with crying. National guidance on bruising in non-mobile babies is put into practice through local protocols, so what staff are taught differs from area to area.
Intended parents become a child's legal parents through a court order after the birth, outside the placement process. In 2023 the Law Commissions recommended a new surrogacy pathway with a welfare assessment before conception. That reform has not been taken forward. Unshaken asks for preparation for coping with crying to be built into any future surrogacy pathway.
Some agencies may teach this already. We want it to be a recorded requirement for every baby placement, so that whether a carer is prepared does not depend on where they live.
Most babies go home with the parents they were born to. Every one of them should be ready for the crying. Whether they are still depends on where they live and who is in the room.
England’s health-visiting guidance includes coping with crying in the new-birth and six-to-eight-week reviews. It lists ICON as a resource for antenatal, new-birth and six-to-eight-week reviews, and targeted three- and six-month reviews. Unshaken asks for the same preparation to be offered to every new parent, mother, father and partner, before the baby comes home, with a written crying plan.
The national review found that in the majority of cases where babies are injured or killed, men are the perpetrators, and that men are too often invisible to services. Unshaken asks for fathers, partners and male carers to be specifically engaged in this preparation.
ICON, the dedicated programme that teaches parents to cope with crying, is taken up area by area. The first health board in Wales to adopt it did so in November 2025. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde partnered with ICON in September 2025.
Preparation is only half of it. After a baby is placed, the agency is still visiting and reviewing. In England, a child placed for adoption must live with the adopters for at least ten weeks before they can apply for an adoption order, and the agency keeps reviewing the placement until the order is made.
Those months are when warning signs can be seen: a carer saying the crying is too much, or speaking about the baby in angry or threatening ways. A warning like that should set things in motion, not sit in a file.
Coping with crying and preventing head injury made a required part of preparation for every adopter, foster carer and kinship carer of a baby — completed before placement for adopters and foster carers, or within days in an emergency, and given to kinship carers at the point of placement. It must never delay or prevent a baby going to family.
Every adult caring for the baby takes part, with fathers, partners and male carers specifically engaged, as the national review recommended.
Each carer makes a simple written plan: what calms them, who they will call at three in the morning, and where they will put the baby safely if they need to step away. It is checked at the first visit after placement, reviewed at every statutory visit until the baby's first birthday, and recorded on the child's care plan and health record, so the health visitor and GP can see it too.
When any carer of a placed baby, including prospective adopters, tells a professional the crying is too much, or speaks about the baby in angry or threatening ways, it is treated as a safeguarding concern, not a complaint: recorded, shared with the child's social worker the same day, and followed by an urgent visit, extra support and a review of the placement. Every professional visiting the home asks the carer directly how they are coping with the crying. For adopters, any such concerns, and how they were resolved, go in the agency's report to the court before an adoption order is made.
When a carer tells their agency that a new adult has joined the household, as foster carers already must, that adult is offered the same preparation. Anyone the agency approves to look after the baby, such as a respite carer, completes it before doing so. No new restriction on who can live in the home — it uses contact that already happens.
Completion confirmed at each carer's annual review and checked by the inspectorate in each nation, with yearly published figures on head injuries to babies placed with adopters, foster carers and kinship carers, so progress can be measured.
Safeguarding training for anyone caring for babies under one in nurseries, with childminders and in other early years settings covers the warning signs of head injury, that any bruise on a baby who is not yet mobile is a red flag, and how to support a parent or carer who is struggling with crying. One national standard, not a different local rule in every area. In England, that means updating Annex C of the early years framework.
Coping with crying offered to every birth parent as standard — mother, father and partner — by midwives and health visitors in the baby's first days, with a clear national standard for what every parent is told. Offered as support, not required as a test.
The same protection in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and built into any future surrogacy pathway, so no baby's safety depends on their postcode.
This is preparation and support for carers, not a test that keeps them out. Children need more foster carers, adopters and kinship carers, not fewer. Every one of them deserves to be ready.
No one should face the crying that will not stop without being ready. Every parent and every carer, prepared. Every baby, unshaken.
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