New moms are often in a pretty vulnerable emotional space. Some babies are really fussy and hard to soothe and/or seem to prefer other people to their mother. It is easy as a new parent, even a healthy new parent, to feel terrorized by your baby and pretty common to experience feelings of hatred or resentment toward the baby. If a mom is narcissitic or otherwise emotionally unwell to start with, was looking to her baby for validation and love, gets a fussy baby and has little support from others around her it can be a perfect storm for blaming the baby and experiencing the baby as rejecting or attributing malicious intent to her baby's behaviour. (No joke, I had a friend who sincerely believed that her five week old was being smiley that day because he knew he'd been "bad" the day before and was trying to make it up to her.)

But it is not the baby's job to soothe it's mother's insecurities, it is the mother's (parent's) job to soothe her baby. The baby doesn't exist to inflate the mothers ego. A mother who is hoping to get validation from her baby is a mother who is in a lot of trouble. The baby has no emotional resources, no experience of the world, nothing to draw on but what she gets from her parents and caregivers. The parent has to help the baby attach and sometimes that's pretty easy and sometimes it's not. The baby isn't rejecting its mother, it just hasn't yet attached. It's the parents' job to keep at it, cope with their frustration and feelings of rejection and continue to provide lots of attachment.