Persistent crying and parenting: Search for a butterfly in a dynamic system

Abstract

The risks and c a m of persistent crying in early infancy are discussed on the basis of a study of 61 infants referred to the Munich Interdisciplinary Research and Intervention Program for Fussy Babies for persistent crying between 1 and 6 months of age, and of a community sample of 51 infants of the same age. Particular attention was paid to pre-verbal parent-infant communication, the development of which was interpreted in terms of a dynamic interactional system including both regulatory and communicative predispositions in infants and intuitive competence for supporting infant predispositions in parents. Neither a gut problem nor any other single causal factor was identified for persistent crying in the majority of cases. In contrast, persistent crying was significantly slesociated with multiple biological and psychosocial risk factors for both parents and infants. Neurological immaturity, difficult temperament and sleep problems in infants, and impaired psychological conditions, limited resources and failures of intuitive competences in mothers were found to threaten the developmental process in infants and give rise to 'vicious circles' which were destabilizing the interactional systems. Increased attention to intuitive parental competences is recommended as one effective model for therapeutic interventions. Keywords: persistent crying infant colic; intuitive parenting preverbal communication; paren-infant interaction; interactional failures Persistent crying has remained an unresolved puzzle and a major challenge for developmental researchers in spite of numerous attempts to study its risk factors and causes. h e to its acoustic qualities, infant crying has a peremptory impact on parents such that 'one can. . . appreciate why a parent must interfere with the baby's crying: this sound is too annoying to be tolerated beyond a short period of time, particularly at close range.. . . a cry cries to be turned off' (Ostwald, 1963, p.46). However, a substantial minority of otherwise normal infants spend the first months of life suffering from a condition described as 'paroxysms of irritability, fussing, or crying lasting for a total of more than three hours a day and occurring on more than three days in any oneweek ' (Wessel ef al., 1954, p.425). This condition, usually termed 'colic' or, more appropriately, 'persistent crying' (St James-Roberts, 1993), refers to prolonged periods of unexplained and inconsolable crying and fussiness.In the first part of the present article, we review current research on crying in context from various

Associations between Infants' Crying, Sleep and Cortisol Secretion and Mother's Sleep and Well-Being

“…It is apparent that synchronization of the sleep/wake cycle also emerges with increasing IC, but there is no clear-cut pattern of sleep in infants with IC compared to healthy controls. Whereas Kirjavainen et al [13] observed no statistical difference in objectively assessed sleep duration or fragmentation between infants with and without IC over a period of 24 h, others have reported decreased sleep during the day [14,15]. These conflicting results may reflect methodological differences insofar as both subjective (i.e.…”

“…Raiha et al [30] assumed that these dysfunctional behaviors had probably emerged as a result of infant's crying behavior and not vice versa. Papousek and von Hofacker [15] reported increased scores of depression, exhaustion, frustration, anger and anxious overprotection in mothers with infants with IC relative to mothers with infants without IC. In this vein, St James-Roberts et al [31] found that mothers with infants suffering from IC had higher scores for depressive symptoms compared to mothers of infants without IC.…”

“…First, following Papousek and von Hofacker [15], St James-Roberts et al [31] and Megel et al [32], we expected mothers' psychological well-being to be related to their infants' crying. Second, following the proposal of Out et al [1] of a synchrony between an infant's and its mother's arousal, we expected that infants' cortisol levels would predict mothers' psychological well-being.…”

Regulatory Problems in Very Preterm and Full-Term Infants Over the First 18 Months

“…3 Early RPs may be associated with trajectories of dysregulation into childhood 4 and subsequent cognitive, behavior and attention problems, [5][6][7][8][9][10][11] especially if crying or feeding problems persist beyond the age of 3 to 4 months. [1][2][3]6,[12][13][14] In addition, multiple RPs, i.e. having two or three single RPs at the same time, increases the likelihood of later behavior problems.…”

The Effect of Excessive Crying on the Development of Emotion Regulation

“…In one study, infants with colic were found to look "typical" in their responses to aversive stimuli after the colic was resolved (Stifter & Braungart, 1992). On the other hand, investigations on the outcomes of colic suggest that excessive crying in early infancy represents the extreme on a temperamental continuum (Carey, 1972;Jacobson & Melvin, 1995;Lehtonen, Korhonen, & Korvenranta, 1994) or is the result of continued insensitive, overstimulating parenting (Papoušek & von Hofacker, 1995). Interestingly, in one study infants with "persistent crying" were found to show stability in negative reactivity immediately after the colic resolved, but no differences were observed several months later (St. James Roberts, Conroy, & Wilsher, 1998b).…”