It's never easy to cope with a fussy baby, but these strategies may help you to hold on to what's left of your sanity until your baby outgrows this frustrating stage.
Humbling experience
Courtney Taylor Hausman may be only four months of age, but she's already managed to stump two adults with graduate degrees in human development: her parents!
"Caring for Courtney has been a humbling experience, to say the least," said Courtney's father, Charles Hausman, an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Maine. Like many babies her age, Courtney is prone to fits of inconsolable crying, with some episodes lasting for as long as three hours at a time.
Her parents have tried every trick in the book to try to console her, but the only thing that seems to soothe her is the tape of "white noise" that her parents made by recording blow dryer and vacuum cleaner sounds.
Crying is a survival skill
It's not surprising that Charles and his wife Christine find Courtney's crying episodes so disturbing, says Claire Lerner Littman, a licensed clinical social worker with Zero to Three, the National Centre for Infants, Toddlers, and Families, in Washington, D.C. Babies are programmed to elicit a strong response from their parents when they cry.
"Crying is a baby's most powerful mode of communication during the first weeks of life," explained Littman. "Parents find a baby's cry distressing - and for good reason. It encourages them to respond to their baby's needs."
Dr. Alan Greene - a pediatrician in San Mateo, California - agrees. Difficult as these crying episodes may be, he believes that they actually help to cement the bonds between babies and their parents.
"I believe that colic exists in order to change deeply ingrained relationship habits," he explained. "Even after the miracle of a new birth, many parents and families would revert back to their previous schedules and activities within a few weeks if the new baby would only remain quiet and peaceful. Instead, the baby's exasperating fussy period forces families to leave their previous ruts and develop new dynamics which include this new individual. Colic demands attention. As parents grope for solutions to their child's crying, they notice a new individual with new needs. They instinctively pay more attention, talk more to the child, and hold the child more - all because of the colic. Colic is a powerful rite of passage, a postnatal labor pain where new patterns of family life are born."
