Crying facts for kids

A child crying.

Crying is the shedding of tears (or welling of tears in the eyes) in response to an emotional state. This includes anger, happiness, or sadness. The act of crying has been defined as "a complex phenomenon characterized by the shedding of tears from the lacrimal apparatus, without any irritation of the ocular structure.

Various forms of crying are known as weeping, wailing, whimpering, bawling, and blubbering. Tears produced during emotional crying have a chemical composition which differs from other types of tears.

Frequency of crying

According to the German Society of Ophthalmology, which has collated different scientific studies on crying, the average woman cries between 30 and 64 times a year, and the average man cries between 6 and 17 times a year.

Men tend to cry for between two and four minutes, and women cry for about six minutes. Crying turns into sobbing for women in 65% of cases, compared to just 6% for men. Until adolescence, however, no difference between the sexes was found.

Images for kids

• 

  Two women weep at a funeral

• 

  A newborn child crying

• 

  A Frenchman sheds tears of patriotic grief (1940)

• 

  Detail from Descent from the Cross, c. 1435 by Rogier van der Weyden, the tears of Mary of Clopas

• 

  A diagram showing the lacrimal apparatus

See also

In Spanish: Llanto para niños