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Home › Articles › Basic Care › Calming Fussy Babies

Calming Fussy Babies

5 Top Tips for Parents to Help Soothe Infants

By Shannon McKelden

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Teething Tools
There's no doubt that tooth pain makes babies miserable. Helping them out a little can make everyone in the household happier and better rested.

Winter Prosapio of Canyon Lake, Texas, recommends dipping a spoon in ice water to ease Baby's teething pain. "This will give a baby something cool to bite down on," says the mother of two former teethers. She suggests using pliable plastic spoons, but says normal spoons work just as well.

Kelli Estes of Snohomish, Wash., mother to two young sons, says to use a cold wet washcloth for Baby to suck on. Lipman suggests something similar. "Take a clean, white athletic sock and fill it with ice cubes and let a teething baby gnaw away," she says.

Freedom from Fussiness
Sometimes no matter what a parent does, getting Baby to stop fussing seems impossible. Distraction works best in most circumstances.

Estes suggests sitting Baby on the counter at the edge of the sink. "Run cool water over his toes," she says. "He'll be so surprised that he'll stop his fussing and start playing." She has also found that distracting babies with the view from a window – of passing cars or pedestrians, for instance – works very well to bring them out of grumpy moods after naptime.

Sleeping Solutions
Need help getting Baby to sleep? Lipman is full of ideas, first reminding parents that babies are used to lots of noise inside the womb. "Using white noise, such as turning on the hair dryer [or] vacuum can be very calming," she says.

Other moms agree with the white noise solution, having tried various creative methods. Estes found that taking her sons into a bathroom with the fan running drowned out distracting noises when they had trouble sleeping. "This also works if you're at someone else's house and need to put the baby down, say, in the master bedroom," she says. "Turn on the fan in the adjoining bathroom and the new house sounds won't be so jarring."


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