So You Think You Have a Colicky Baby, Have You Tried Infant Massage, Probiotics, or Changing your Diet?
Babies communicate by crying. As a parent, when your baby cries, you go through a checklist in your head: are they hungry?, is their diaper dirty?, do they need to be burped?, are they bored?, are they tired? Sometimes, nothing works. For my daughter during weeks 4-10, we had to constantly bounce her on an exercise ball or the side of the bed to get her to stop crying. Removing dairy and soy from my diet seemed to help lessen her crying. For some parents, they try everything and their baby still cries. They call this colic. There could be an underlying cause that could be diagnosed, but many times it's related to gastrointestinal pain. Technically, it's when your baby cries for 3 hours a day 3 days a week for 3 weeks. It does not hurt the infant, but causes parents significant distress. Having dreamt of a happy, smiling baby, days get long and the parent-child relationship gets complicated by parents trying to survive this period. A very small percentage of the time (~5%) an etiology for this colic may present itself (i.e. food allergies, reflux, etc). However, in many cases, this often seems to be a phase babies go through. Around 26% of infants develop colic, with 50% of cases resolving on their own around 3 months.
What can parents do to help their infant and their sanity?
- Infant Massage: When a group of 40 infants between the ages of 2 and 6 weeks were given either massages by their mothers using lavender oil or no intervention, it was found that colic symptoms were lessened in the infants who received massages. A 2006 Systematic Review of the effectiveness of infant massage found benefits on the mother-infant interaction, infant sleeping, and crying.
- Probiotics: Lactobacillus reuteri was found to be effective in reducing crying times in breastfeeding infants after taking it for seven days.
- Nutrition/Dietary Modification of Breastfeeding Mothers: When mothers of infants who cried more than 300 minutes/day were put on low-allergen diets (no egg, wheat, soy, cow's milk, peanuts, fish, or tree nuts), 74% of infants were crying significantly less.
- Fennel Seed Oil: In a study done in Russia, giving infants between 5 to 20 mL of a 0.1% fennel seed oil emulsion up to four times per day for a week decreased crying to less than 9 hours per week.
- Botanical Blends (often found in Gripe Water): An herbal tea (~90mL/day) containing fennel, chamomile, vervain, licorice, and lemon balm was given to Israeli infants between 2 and 8 weeks reduced crying time from about 200 minutes per day to around 76.9 minutes per day.
- Chiropractic treatments: Of the studies done so far, they have found no benefit in using chiropractic manipulation to treat colic.
- Osteopathic manipulative medicine: Children who received OMM had reduced crying times and had better sleep.
- Acupuncture: Light stimulation of the acupuncture point LI4 twice a week for 3 weeks has shown reduction in duration and intensity of crying time, but more studies need to be done.
- Changing formula from regular cow's milk protein based to soy or hypoallergenic formulas
My own personal experience:
- Baby Wearing: Babies feel more comforted when you can recreate a womb-like environment for them.
- Warm Bath: If your baby will tolerate, make sure you wrap them up in a towel as soon as taking them out of the water.
- Exercise ball bouncing/Bed bouncing: This can help lull them to sleep.
- Music/white noise/fans: Blaring Outkast while dancing.
If an infants crying ever gets too much for you to handle, put them down in their crib/bassinet or call someone that can give you a break. This too shall pass.
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