caring for babies + toddlers
Colic babies BY ADAM O’BRIEN
How do you deal with colic in childcare?
F
over four hours and may continue for several months, generally starting around or just before the six-week mark.
Continuous crying can cause tremendous distress for parents and childcare providers. But colic is often used as a label for many infants who are simply showing normal crying behaviours. Although constantly in flux, current wisdom states that colic-related pain is caused by excessive wind or reflux.
According to Ms Barker, a certain amount of crying is normal, despite the fact that all that fuss can make it sound as though something is wrong. ‘Wessel’s Criteria’, named after Yale professor of paediatrics Morris Wessel, is the traditional measure for colic behaviour: babies who cry for more than three hours a day, for three days in a row, for at least three weeks. If babies clearly exceed these parameters, a medical professional, ideally a paediatrician, should be consulted to eliminate any underlying ailment besides colic.
irstly, what is colic? A contentious issue, but according to Baby Love, the comprehensive baby how-to guide written by Robin Barker, a registered nurse, midwife and parentcraft nurse with 30 years’ experience with families and babies, ‘Colic is a general term which means acute paroxysmal pain’. The definition continues on to point out that ‘Nowhere else in medicine do we use the word ‘colic’ without describing the site of the pain – for example, renal colic, biliary colic, menstrual colic’, she said. Hence, ‘The word ‘colic’ as a diagnosis for a baby’s crying really means ‘This baby is crying a lot and we don’t know why’.’
Ms Barker said, ‘Babies cry, get red in the face and pull their knees up to their chest and can fart loudly, which is why colic is commonly associated with a pain in the gut.’ Instances of these attacks can last for
In the vast majority of situations, babies are healthy and developing normally. ‘eighty per cent of babies, within 24 hours, will have a period of time in the day when they are inconsolable,’ she said. This varies for all babies, but is often in the early evening or morning, which, thankfully for childcare providers, means that they are usually at their calmest during the day.
‘A care provider needs to understand the normal range of sleeping and crying babies do,’ said Ms Barker. ‘At that age they sleep around 12 to 14 hours out of 24 – less than what some people assume.’ Parents and providers try numerous ways to find the source of a baby’s crying by feeding, changing, rocking and cuddling, often to no avail. The real root cause of ‘colic’ is unknown. It may be due to swallowing excessive air, a reaction to a food, or simply a baby’s general adjustment. This hasn’t stopped the hunt for a cure. ‘When helping parents with crying babies, we’ve always wanted to call crying something, which [to the parents] means there is a cure,’ said Ms Barker, who isn’t fond of the term ‘colic’ as it’s a generalisation. ‘But talk to 10 healthcare professionals and they will all tell you something different, and if you include natural therapies, naturopaths and the like, well… In my 30 years of experience, no medication has had
BELONGING EARLY YEARS JOURNAL • VOLUME 1 NUMBER 1 2012 • 75