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Home › Articles › Crying Issues › Coping with Colic

Coping with Colic

How to Help Your Baby – and Yourself

By Lisa Hurt Kozarovich

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Four days after giving birth, Missy Goodson was falling into a comfortable routine with her adorable daughter. But by day five, her bundle of joy suddenly had become inconsolable, wailing non-stop for hours on end.

"Babies cry," friends told her. "It's colic – just wait it out," the pediatrician said. Neither was any consolation to the Louisville, Ky. mother of two.

The fact that doctors simply don't know much about colic, including what causes it or exactly how to treat it, left Goodson feeling helpless. "There was no soothing her," Goodson says. "She cried day and night, no matter what we did. We tried swaddling her in a blanket, rocking her, bouncing her – nothing worked. I felt like I was losing my mind.

"The low point was probably when I took Sydney to the emergency room after she had been crying for six hours straight. I handed her to the nurse and she stopped crying. I thought I must just be the worst mother ever."

That's a typical reaction for a mother of a baby with colic, according to Dr. Barry Lester, Ph.D., who sees patients at the country's only colic clinic, located at Women & Infants Hospital in Rhode Island.

"About 45 percent of the moms who show up at our clinic are depressed," says Dr. Lester, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Brown University. "Oftentimes, they bring home this 10-pound Gerber baby and everything is going great, then literally overnight, this kid starts screaming and is inconsolable. Frequently, the mother blames herself or some misinformed relative tells her it's no big deal and she's overreacting."

In fact, no one knows just what causes about 20 percent of all babies to get colic, which generally begins at about 4 to 6 weeks and lasts for several weeks, according to Dr. Andrea McCoy, M.D., director of primary care at Temple University Children's Medical Center in Philadelphia, Penn. However, colic can begin almost immediately after birth and last up to four months, she says.

Clear signs of colic are unexplained, persistent and hard crying in an otherwise healthy baby, restlessness, inconsolability, the baby's curling of fingers and toes, arching of back or breath holding, McCoy says.

"Those are the behaviors we call colic. What we don't know is cause, but we're coming to find it's probably a mixed bag of causes," says Dr. Marsha Ellett, D.N.S, R.N, who is conducting studies on infant colic at Indiana University. The five most probable causes, and some possible solutions, she says, are:

Cause:

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