A crying baby

When a baby cries, parents get extremely worried and immediately consider calling the pediatrician or taking the baby to the doctor. This is a very natural thing to do as parents think there must be something wrong for a baby to cry so much. In my experience, while about 10 in 100 children are certainly sick and need medical attention, almost 90% of the babies who cry excessively have no major problem and can be soothed and comforted with just a few simple measures.


While an entire discussion on causes of crying is outside the scope of this blog, the commonest causes of crying include:

• hunger or thirst
• stomach colic
• uncomfortable clothing/swaddling/too cold or too warm a temperature
• passed urine or stool and feeling uncomfortable
• has a stuffy nose and cannot breathe easily
• has pain somewhere, most commonly the ears, the throat or some place else
• is feeling bored or tired and wants you to soothe him, carry him, cuddle him or just talk to him

Having said that, let me add that sometimes, it is not possible to discover the cause - not even the doctor succeeds in finding out the reason in each and every case. In such cases, the doctor may order some tests such as trying out a feed, changing his clothing, offering him water, putting salt-water nose drops, turning him on the stomach and gently stroking his back, and so on.

If your baby cries without any apparent reason, try doing those things before you run to the doctor. However, do not waste time if the baby has additional symptoms like fever, refusal of feeds, loose motions, vomiting, a bad cough or running nose, or almost anything else that you, as a parent, do not understand.

Among all the causes that I have listed, stomach colic is by far the most common cause of excessive crying in infants less than four months old. When the pain comes, the baby draws his legs upto this stomach, clenches his fists, and starts crying loudly. The stomach feels tight. He may vomit some milk or curd from a previous feed, and will stop suckling when the pain occurs. The problem tends to subside on its own within two or three minutes. It recurs almost every night; the good news is that although it looks bad, there is no long-term problem with it and babies almost always outgrow this condition in three to four months.

One word of advice. Most mothers think that if their baby is crying, it means that they don't have sufficient milk and therefore the baby remains hungry. This is almost always NOT TRUE. However, the ensuing panic may actually cause so much tension in the mother's mind that she may stop secreting the right quantity of milk as a result.