Why is my baby hysterical

When your baby pays attention to you, you respond with gentle touch, soothing tone of voice, and playful facial expressions. When your baby looks away, you do the same. Sharing joy with your baby establishes a connection between sensory experiences things your baby sees, hears, and feels and safe and loving interaction with another person. Your baby seeks engagement with you and participates in the back-and-forth exchange of gestures, smiles, sounds, and movement.

Your baby will probably need frequent breaks from interacting. You continue to let your baby lead the exchange. When your baby wants to interact, you respond with playful activity. If your baby wants to take a break, you slow down.

Your baby uses an ever-increasing range of sounds, facial expressions, and gestures—wide eyes, coos, nonsensical babbles, giggles, pointing—to invite you to play and to indicate needs and wants.

You should notice more back and forth communication. Your baby starts to combine their motor and nonverbal skills with their need to solve problems. For example, your baby might point to something out of reach or crawl to the highchair when hungry. Colic is a general term used for babies who cry more than three hours a day for more than three days a week. A baby with colic will often cry inconsolably despite all attempts to comfort and soothe.

The cause of colic, which affects one in five babies, is not clear. Parents of babies with colic often say that the babies look like they are angry or in pain, have gas, or are trying to go to the bathroom without success. Other characteristics of a baby with colic:.

It may feel endless and unbearable while you are in the midst of it, but it will end. In order to make it through, you will have to develop some great self-care strategies and enlist support.

Ask your doctor to consider the possibilities of food allergies or acid reflux GERD , which can be remedied. Problems that are identified early can almost always be solved. If your baby is crying or upset often, or unresponsive, you should seek help from your pediatrician or a child development specialist.

Your pediatrician should be able to recommend a specialist in early infant behaviors to help you figure out if there is a problem and what to do about it.

Alternately, contact the pediatrics branch in your local hospital and ask about services in your area, such as:. Parenting skills classes. Available in many areas, coaching and education for parents and caregivers can build necessary parenting skills and offer support and advice. Support groups. Pacific Ocean Pediatrics.

What in the world was wrong with my baby? I started asking everyone I knew if they had solutions for me I heard about reflux and liver problems, genetic diseases and uncommon illnesses, but nothing that helped me with Garrett. One woman told me he was probably allergic to my breast milk or the formula, so I should put him on an all carrot juice diet.

After consulting with our physician, the carrot juice idea was out, but I did try a series of different, expensive formulas, none of which seemed to have any impact on the crying. The only differences I could see were in our wallets and in my frustration. For days and weeks on end, I listened to crying all day long, most days for nearly eight hours, usually in a three-hour crying block and a five-hour crying block. No matter what I did, he would not stop crying and I could not get the crying sound out of my head.

He was still waking up frequently in the night; I was sleep deprived, exhausted and truly on the brink of insanity. I didn't know what depression was really like, but I was beginning to wonder if this was it.

I constantly had negative feelings and did not want to listen to one more minute of crying from my baby. For a while, I distanced myself from him, rarely even using his name, calling him "the baby or "that baby" instead of Garrett.

I didn't even want to have a baby anymore and I began to regret that he was born. In the early hours of a cold March morning, I sat on my floor, crying and trying unsuccessfully to calm the baby. I decided that I was a failure as a mother. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with my baby, and I certainly couldn't fix it.

I was so angry at this innocent little baby that, at times, I didn't even like him anymore. I wanted to get away from the baby and the relentless crying. I was so desperate, I thought I would try anything.

My one saving grace during this time was the small breaks I would get once in a while when a friend or family member would offer to take Garrett for a few hours.

I began to count down the hours until those moments, and use the memories of those hours as fuel to keep me going until the next break. I had never before felt so awful about myself or one of my children. I didn't like myself, my baby or my life. My husband would come home from work and we would talk for hours about what we could do to help me to be happy again, for my happiness was gone.

We would toss ideas around, but in the end, I knew none of them would work. My baby, whom I loved so dearly and brought into the world, was causing me so much grief and pain, I couldn't even function. I began to think I would never be the same again. I had terrible thoughts about leaving my family, just to get away from it all. And though the rational part of me know I didn't really want anything to happen to my baby, I found myself running through scenarios in my mind where Garrett became sick and died, or was given up for adoption.

I could never bring myself to tell anyone about these feelings because they were just too horrible. That is how I began to think of myself Just when I thought I could not survive one more day, things started to get a little better. After several months of daily crying, I noticed Garrett began to improve. He did not stop crying overnight, but slowly, and surely, his bouts of crying lessened in length and decreased in frequency. By the end of the summer, Garrett was nearly a different child.

It was hard to look at him and remember how hard it had really been. But, for five months solid, he cried inconsolably for nearly eight hours a day. By his sixth month, he was crying less and finally, by eight months, he seemed like a normal child. Only after I had survived Garrett's months of crying did I learn about the Period of PURPLE Crying and find out that my experience was not unusual, that in fact, one in four babies is a high crier and many mothers have felt exactly the way I did.

I also learned that infant crying is the number one trigger to shaken baby syndrome and other forms of infant abuse. That night, I prayed and thanked God that during all the frustrating days of crying, no one ever never "lost it" with my baby.

Garrett is now a normal, happy, healthy three-year-old boy. Well, if normal means that he thinks he is Spiderman and is somehow able to convince everyone to lift him up so he can climb the walls and shoot his webs, then he is normal.

He has no remaining signs or symptoms from his once fussy days. In fact, he is now a big brother to the fourth child in our family. On April 23, , another little boy, Taylor was born into our family. Weighing in at 5lbs. Taylor's days of crying did come, but they were manageable.

Whenever he would get particularly fussy, especially in the evenings, my husband would look at me and say, "It's OK, he is having a PURPLE moment, just put him down in his crib. He will be fine. But, most importantly, understanding the properties of crying, and knowing that the time of high crying was temporary, made those weeks bearable. I still didn't like to hear my sweet little baby crying, but this time, I knew he really was going to be just fine, and so was I.

Veronica was an angel in the hospital after she was born. She continued her angelness for the next three to four weeks and then all of the sudden everything changed, it was like someone switched my happy, content baby with a baby I had never met. And the crying started at the same time every evening, you could set a clock by her. Everyone dreaded 7pm because we all knew what was coming. During this time I would wind up going to be in tears from the stress, it's not easy listening to your newborn cry and not be able to do anything to stop it.

At her month check up, her pediatrician mentioned the word colic. What a relief to finally find something that actually made sense, because colic surely didn't It made me realize there wasn't anything wrong with my baby and that she wasn't sick or in pain. It made me realize this crying was normal, my baby just did it more than others.

This can help your baby feel secure. Hum a gentle, calming tune. Your baby knows your voice and prefers it to other sounds. Lay your baby on their side in the cot and rhythmically pat their back.

Gently turn baby onto their back if they fall asleep. Try putting in some imaginary earplugs. Let the sound of the crying pass through you, and remind yourself that everything is OK. Take your baby for a walk in the pram or a sling. Movement can sometimes be soothing. This can help to settle your baby.

See our illustrated, step-by-step guide to soothing a crying baby. It's very common for even the best sleepers to suddenly start having problems, whether it's trouble falling asleep at bedtime or abruptly waking up during the night.

Starting at age 6 months, separation anxiety can cause babies to wake up crying more than once during the night. Don't be surprised if your anxious baby does this and wants only you — or only your partner. Other common causes of night-waking in previously good sleepers include illness or a looming developmental leap. In those cases, there are a couple of things to try, in addition to treating the fever or throat or ear pain that's making your sick baby uncomfortable. First, make sure that your little one is getting enough sleep in general.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the less sleep babies get , the more likely they are to have trouble settling down at bedtime and staying asleep through the night. So be consistent about putting your baby to bed for naps during the day and getting him to bed at a reasonable time in the evening.