Why is my baby crying?

Our baby daughter Camila has been suffering from bouts of bad gas that make her cry and shriek in pain. It’s heartbreaking and frustrating to see her suffer so, so when I came across Why Is My Baby Crying? : The Parent’s Survival Guide for Coping with Crying Problems and Colic by Barry Lester of the Colic Clinic, at the library, I was quick to pick it up and read it. It was a complete waste of time.
Camila, fortunately, does not seem to suffer from colic, at least under the old definition which suggested that colic was unconsolable crying that lasted for at least 3 hours a day, was happening for at least 3 days a week and had been going on for at least 3 weeks. Wisely, Dr. Lester rejects this definition which would have parents endure 27 hours of crying before they could even call it colic (though he does so because he believes so much crying is “normal”, affecting about 20% of babies) and instead offers a diagnosis of crying based on its sudden onset, the quality of the cry (often a pain cry), its physical signs (pulling legs to chest, getting doubled over, holding breath, red face, etc.) and its inconsolability. More importantly, he looks at the consequences of the crying and determines its colic if it causes “clinically significant distress in the family or impairment in the infant”. Under that definition, you could say that Camila has colic.
Diagnosing her is of little use, however, if there is nothing that can be done about it. Apparently there is treatment for colic, Dr. Lester writes about his success stories at the Infant Development Center in Rhode Island at length. But the book offers few hints as to what such treatment might be. In some anecdotes, children with colic were diagnosed with GER, given Zantac and had their parents hold them semi-reclined after feedings and elevate the heads of their cribs – but these seem to be a minority of children who suffer colic. Advice for other cases is scant. The one thing that does come through is that parents should not be blaming themselves, and that they should leave the baby with a babysitter at least once a week and get a breather and an opportunity to work on their relationship. That’s useful advice for any new parents, but doesn’t do much to help the baby.
I did learn one useful thing from the book: to distinguish between regular cries and cries of pain. The latter are “high-pitched, loud, and of sudden onset and include long periods of breath-holding ” – a great description of Camila’s cries when (IMHO) she has gas. But again, the book provides no hints as to how I can help Camila through the pain.
It’s not surprising that the book has no information as to what causes colic, nobody seems to know, but it does make the title of the book a little deceptive. After reading it I have no more clue as to why Camila is crying than before. Indeed, the book seems to dismiss the idea that these pain cries are due to gas (though as she often passes gas immediately after shrieking, I do think they are strongly linked) but offers no other explanations.
Dr. Lester’s purpose in writing the book seems to be to make parents of colicky children feel better: it’s not your fault, take care of yourself and each other, and this too shall pass. Great, but what do we do in the meanwhile?
Dr. Lester is not the only expert with a take on colic. An article in the New York Times earlier this week discusses the new thinking on colic, much of it by researchers who do not come close to agreeing with each other.
r. Ronald G. Barr, a pediatrician and leading authority on colic at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, for example, argues that babies with colic are not in pain and that their cries do not sound different from other cries. Obviously, he’s never heard Camila. He thinks colic is a stage of normal development that babies will outgrow. I don’t disagree with that – but again, I want to know what to do to help Camila until she outgrows it.
Dr. Ian St. James-Roberts, an expert in child development at the University of London Institute of Education, also believes that colic is normal and caused by changes in the brain that occur at around 6 weeks in development. That makes sense and should explain some type of crying, but not the tensed up, red-faced, expanded stomach, clenched fist shrieking that Camila undergoes between bouts of gas passing. Dr. James-Roberts advise to parents is to try to soothe the babies but if the crying persists to walk away. That, I think, is a usually a bad idea both for parents and babies. Even if a baby continues crying, you can’t discount the possibility that the baby is comforted by his parents attempts to soothe him or even by their mere prescence. Abandoning the baby to his own misery will definitely not comfort him and is likely to send the message that his parents don’t care for him. At the same time, as horrible as crying is, I think parents need to learn to deal with it, accept it and accept their own limitations and not just walk away from it or from other parenting situations that they cannot fix.
Finally comes Dr. Harvey Karp with his book The Happiest Baby on the Block (which I haven’t read). His approach is to see the first 3 months of a baby’s life as the fourth trimester of pregnancy and try to calm babies by approximating the conditions of the womb as much as possible. He suggests that babies be first swaddled, then held in one’s arms or on one’s lap and rolled onto their side or stomach, then LOUDLY shushing them in their ear, then jiggling them and finally giving them a finger to suck. Apparently doing these things in order is what helps. There are no studies that confirm his method works, but his books has gotten mostly positive reviews at Amazon.
In all, the New York Times article has convinced me that babies cry for different reasons and that it doesn’t help to see “colic” as one syndrome. Instead, the different types of colic should be studied and treatment options developed.
As for me, I’ll continue looking for ways to make my baby’s gas get better.