OK for Babies to Cry, Moms Told

Stacy Harris and her 7-week-old daughter, Lauren

Hannah Sharpe

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Trying to make an inconsolable baby stop wailing can be a worrisome and frustrating burden, but local nurses and volunteers want to reassure parents that crying is OK.

In conjunction with Child Abuse Prevention Month, nurses at FirstHealth Moore Regional and other hospitals are fitting newborns with purple caps to raise awareness of so-called “period of PURPLE crying.”

The period generally begins at two weeks of age and lasts until babies are three to four months old. All babies go through this period, but extremes in crying vary. PURPLE is an acronym used to describe the specific characteristics of the phase: “peak of crying, unexpected, resists soothing, painlike face, long-lasting and evening” (when crying is generally heavier).

Babies can cry for hours and still be considered healthy or normal.

Volunteers from the North Carolina Hospital Association and individual community knitters donated about 2,500 hand-knitted caps as a part of the PURPLE program, an educational tool that Moore Regional has implemented over the past year to educate parents and caregivers about a stage of frequent, inconsolable crying early in infancy.

Christine Siska is the clinical director for obstetrics at Moore Regional. She and her staff have been educating new parents about PURPLE crying over the past year.

“A lot of parents feel very helpless,” Siska said. “The goal is to educate and reduce the number of shaken baby cases in North Carolina.”

Shaken baby syndrome occurs when an infant is shaken by a much larger person. Statistics show that 30 percent of all infants who are violently shaken die, while 80 percent who survive will suffer from lifelong brain abnormalities.

Loss of control through frustration is the No. 1 cause of shaken-baby cases. Often, those charged in shaken baby cases have no history of violence. Educating young parents and families about the normalcy of crying is a key to preventing shaken baby syndrome. Data has shown that the number of cases have already dropped significantly in North Carolina thanks to educational efforts.

“Just having the opportunity to speak to the mothers,” Siska said. “It’s amazing to them. They all say, ‘If I had just known when I was raising my children.’”

Marion Sharkany, president of the North Carolina Hospital Association volunteers and a longime Moore Regional volunteer, spearheaded the knitting cap program, organizing volunteers. Sharkany garnered enough support to give a cap to every baby born in April at Moore Regional and Richmond Memorial Hospital.

“It was like having a kindling put out and a match touched it — everyone got fired up,” Sharkany said.

Sharkany remembers many sleepless nights comforting a crying child and not knowing what to do. She hopes that the caps, along with the resources provided by the PURPLE program, will reassure new parents.

“It’s not something that you did or didn’t do as a parent,” Sharkany said. “Fifty years ago, we didn’t have that.”

Helga Hawkins hadn’t knitted a stitch in 20 years before becoming involved with the PURPLE Newborn Baby Cap Project. Now the 93-year-old volunteer toymaker has been knitting hats nonstop for newborns — in all colors.

“Making hats for the babies is really exciting,” Hawkins said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had babies!”

Stacy Harris hopes the PURPLE crying period for her 7-week-old daughter, Lauren, has almost peaked.

Harris went through the same thing with her son, who is now 2 1/2. Back then, doctors told her that her son had colic, which has previously been a common diagnosis for the crying period.

“Colic is, they say, a five-letter word for ‘I don’t know,’” Harris said. “I spent the first three months holding him and walking in circles.”

She now knows that her daughter is fine despite the frequent crying.

“Sometimes we all need a little cry, huh?” she said, nuzzling her crying daughter’s nose.

Harris placed her daughter in her stroller and rocked her back and forth. Eventually, Lauren fell asleep. Harris has learned several techniques to help abate the crying to some degree.

“The stroller and car ride — golden!” she said. “She also likes massages on the soles of her feet.”

Harris has used the resources given to her at FirstHealth to also educate her mother about the crying period.

“She, like my husband, was under the impression that something was wrong, that something needed to be fixed,” Harris said. “I kept telling her about the period of PURPLE crying and she didn’t quite get it until she read the Web site. I think she felt a lot better, too, after she read that.”

Harris is amazed at the change in approach to the crying in just two years since she had her first child. She knows that a lot of new mothers have an advantage knowing that the crying is just a normal phase.

Julianne Clodfelter still isn’t sure if her newborn daughter, Libby, will go through a tough PURPLE crying period.

“I’m still in the sleeping phase,” she says of her daughter, who was born April 2. “She’s been a really good baby.”

Though Clodfelter may be off the hook with her daughter, she knows the frustration of PURPLE crying all too well. She went through the period with her oldest son, who is now 9.

“It was tough at times,” she said. “There were times when I just had to walk away — there’s just nothing you can do to appease them and make them stop crying. That was my first time being a mother.”

Clodfelter hopes the efforts to educate new parents will pro-vide some relief and assurance.

“It’s great for all new moms to get this info to know,” Clodfelter said. “It was very frustrating not knowing — was I doing something wrong? Was I doing enough?”

Now, when parents see hues of purple atop the heads of their newborn babies, they can take comfort in knowing that all that crying is just a phase.

Hannah Sharpe can be reached at (910) 693-2485 or hannah@thepilot.com.

More like this story

GoldenDreams 1 year, 9 months ago

I think you have to be careful here, especially with part of your last sentence, "all that crying is just a phase." It sounds a bit too dismissive. All I'm saying is keep in mind that often babies cry for a reason, and it may be a cry for help. I think your article should have stressed checking on the baby a bit more and exploring if the baby really needs something. Judgment is key. Thanks for providing other useful information.

DrMark 1 year, 9 months ago

In her article,"OK For Babies To Cry," Hannah Sharpe asserts that "all babies go through this period...." This is an overstatement at best and simply wrong at its worst. Where is the clinical research in reference to such a statement? If Sharpe is going to make such assertions she should be confined to the opinion page of The Pilot.

TooHot 1 year, 9 months ago

Lead story......? No pies stolen off window sills this weekend to report?

jcinaberdeen 1 year, 9 months ago

Golden and others.. You took the words right out of my mouth! We experienced a LONG crying period, for several months, with our son and also our daughter... We were told it couldn't be colic because our son didn't have the classic 'knees pulled to belly' position of discomfort and because I breast-fed. Okay, so a couple of years later, (and after the birth of our daughter) my husband was in for his own physical. The doctor (or nurse practitioner, not exactly sure) asked him straight out "Why do you look so tired?!" So he told her about how our son went through a good 4 or 5 months of crying non-stop from 12am to 4am every night/morning and now how our daughter was too. We were literally exhausted. She went through the gauntlet of questions we'd been asked before and made sure we were checking everything every time- Is she hungry? Swathed? Wet? Dirty? Nothing we did comforted her. She would literally finally fall asleep from exhausting herself. So the doctor prescribed 'anti-gas' drops for us to try with her. She said it wouldn't hurt to try.. .Guess what? The night-time unconsolable rather, crying STOPPED. We were so relieved for her and for us. We wish we had been offered to at least try this with our son. Now I'm not one to jump to a quick 'pills solve everything' solution, but I looked into it and was told this was an extremely safe medicine to give so we gave it a shot. We almost were a single child family though because of the stress we went through with our first child. I was convinced I was a horrible mother when our daughter started experiencing this too. I had poured over my diet to ensure I wasn't causing dietary distress through my breast milk...

My point? That not EVERY child necessarily experiences this period of crying "just because"... I agree that this should be stressed and not to just assume it's this and not, in fact, a true case of colic, etc. I would insist ALL possibilities be ruled out before succumbing to the 'purple' crying. I do appreciate this information and yes, of course, all babies cry. But we MUST remember that it is their GREATEST form of communication at that age. Purple crying is just ONE of the reasons there are out there. (Although I'd honestly never heard of this until now...)

mjgfam 1 year, 9 months ago

WEAR YOUR BABY!! Several studies show that babies who are worn in a wrap or sling cry less! I know many a mother with a fussy baby who was saved by using a Moby or Sleepywrap. Great info on babywearing. http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/laura_simeon.html#1271732880

Responding to baby's cries is biologically correct. A mother is biologically programmed to give a nurturant response to her newborn's cries and not to restrain herself. Fascinating biological changes take place in a mother's body in response to her infant's cry. Upon hearing her baby cry, the blood flow to a mother's breasts increases, accompanied by a biological urge to "pick up and nurse." The act of breastfeeding itself causes a surge in prolactin , a hormone that we feel forms the biological basis of the term "mother's intuition." Oxytocin, the hormone that causes a mother's milk to letdown, brings feelings of relaxation and pleasure; a pleasant release from the tension built up by the baby's cry. These feelings help you love your baby.

Mothers, listen to the biological cues of your body when your baby cries rather than to advisors who tell you to turn a deaf ear. These biological happenings explain why it's easy for those advisors to say such a thing. They are not biologically connected to your baby. Nothing happens to their hormones when your baby cries. Ignore or respond to the cry signal? Once you appreciate the special signal value of your baby's cry, the important thing is what you do about it. You have two basic options, ignore or respond. Ignoring your baby's cry is usually a lose-lose situation. A more compliant baby gives up and stops signaling, becomes withdrawn, eventually realizes that crying is not worthwhile, and concludes that he is not worthwhile. The baby loses the motivation to communicate with his parents, and the parents miss out on opportunities to get to know their baby. Everyone loses. A baby with a more persistent personality— most high-need babies—does not give up so easily. Instead, he cries louder and keeps escalating his signal, making it more and more disturbing. Responding appropriately to your baby's cry is the first and one of the most difficult, communication challenges you will face as a mother. You will master the system only after rehearsing thousands of cue-responses in the early months. If you initially regard your baby's cry as a signal to be responded to and evaluated rather than as an unfortunate habit to be broken, you will open yourself up to becoming an expert in your baby's signals, which will carry over into becoming an expert on everything about your baby. Each mother-baby signal system is unique. That's why it is so shortsighted for "cry trainers" to prescribe canned cry-response formulas, such as "leave her to cry for five minutes the first night, ten minutes the second," and so on.

Great information from Dr. Sears http://www.askdrsears.com/html/5/T051200.asp