Coping With Infant Colic A Guide for Parents
Deborah Sarsgard, Medical Writer
William Waldman, MD
Every day for 3 months, I sat on the couch trying to block out the baby’s screaming. When my husband came home at night, I’d be in the same position and I had the same dirty nightgown I’d been in when he left that morning. I didn’t care.”
“I called up my husband at his office and said, ‘Charlie, you’d better come home right away or your son’s gong to get thrown out the window.’ I knew I couldn’t take another hour of it.”
These are the recollections of two mothers whose lives were thrown into turmoil by a colicky baby. Similar colic stories are exchanged each day in supermarket check-out lines, pediatricians’ waiting rooms, and city playgrounds.
The writhing, screaming, inconsolable infant is the exact opposite of the cuddly, cooing newborn that parents hope for. Parents worry about how an infant who seems so miserable can grow and thrive. In addition, the parents experience feelings of depression, helplessness, and inadequacy – feelings that are desperate and frightening.
Hundreds of books are available about infants – their growth and development, personalities and care – but few, if any, focus on colic. To learn more about this widespread but poorly understood condition, parents of colicky or formerly colicky babies were interviewed. They were asked how they felt about their infants, how they handled these feelings, how the colic affected their marriages, what remedies they tried, and what advice they would give to other parents in a similar situation.
This guide reports the experiences of these parents. One purpose of the guide is to provide worried parents with the support that comes from the realization that other parents have “been there” too. In addition, this booklet seeks to answer questions and to present information that might not be readily available from pediatricians and other health care professionals, friends, relatives, or baby care manuals.
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