The Great British Baby Crying Crisis

Yes, it is now official. Baby crying in the UK leads the world in the wailing stakes! Professor Dieter Wolke from Warwick University recently released his meta study formulating the world’s first universal charts for the “normal” amount of crying in newborns.

This week, I was interviewed by Hattie Garlick on the Daily Telegraph about all this, and she has written an excellent article bringing together many angles of the crying problem for British babies.

This new study highlights the prevalence of colic among babies worldwide in the first 12 weeks of life and draws on data from 8,700 babies from 28 previous studies. And guess what? British babies are among the best in the world at crying. That is one heck of a lot of overtired babies and parents living on one small island.

On average, it was found that babies from around the world all cry for around two hours per day in the first two weeks. Crying commonly peaks to around two hours fifteen minutes per day at the six-week stage and then reduces gradually to a typical 1 hour 10 minutes by the twelve-week mark.

Colic is defined in this Warwick study as those babies who cry for more than three hours per day for at least 3 days a week. The highest levels of colic were found in babies from the UK (28% of infants at 1-2 weeks). So why is it that we Brits breed colicky babies, or is there something different we are doing? Should we be learning from other countries?

I remember well the witching hours from 5pm to 9pm every night with my first one. He screamed and screamed every evening for hours and we were at our wits end! We read the baby books and tried their suggestions, but not much helped and resigned ourselves to the fact he would grow out of it, which luckily, he did. However, I swore that we would have a different outcome for our other babies. When I was less sleep deprived I did some of my own research into the reasons behind why colic is triggered, and found evidence that friendly bacteria to support the gut microbiome and vitamin D might help. These small interventions made a huge difference to my other babies and the evenings were certainly more peaceful. We also see many crying new born babies in our clinics, with sleep deprived and frazzled parents and often probiotics and a top up of vitamin D make quite a difference.

I wonder if making probiotics and vitamin D a normal part of the pregnancy and the fourth trimester could change things for the better for our British babies? It would be great to see one day that we have the most content and healthy babies in the world and I suspect these small changes could make quite a difference.

References

• Probiotics for infantile colic: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial investigating Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 17938.
• Probiotics to prevent or treat excessive infant crying: systematic review and meta-analysis
• Early-life nutritional exposures and lifelong health: immediate and long-lasting impacts of probiotics, vitamin D, and breastfeeding.
• Intervention strategies for cesarean section-induced alterations in the microbiota-gut-brain axis