How much should a newborn baby cry?
Newborn babies cry an average of about 2 hours per day for the first six weeks, then about one hour per day by the time they are 10 weeks old. I’m Dr. Wagner, a board certified pediatrician, and mom of three kids, and if you are worried about how much your newborn baby is crying, the good news is that with each week a baby gets older after six weeks, crying decreases dramatically. In a 2017 study (linked below) reviewing the prospective crying diaries (considered the gold standard for this kind of research) of about 9000 newborns between 1964 and 2015 throughout the world, babies were found to cry on average of 117-133 in the first six weeks. The study showed a very slight increase in crying from weeks 1-2 to weeks 3-4 to weeks 5-6, but the differences between the initial weeks were not statistically significant – all of the first six weeks had the highest amount of crying overall. Colic, defined by the modified Wessel criteria of crying more than 3 hours per day at least 3 days in the last week, was very frequent in the first six weeks – reported by close to 1 in 4 of infants six weeks and under in the study, down to 11% by 8-9 weeks, and to less than 1% by 10-12 weeks. Interestingly – parents in Germany, Denmark and Japan (only 2% of babies ever met criteria for colic) reported on average the least fussy babies, and Canada, Italy and the Netherlands the fussiest.
If you feel like your new baby is crying a lot in the first few weeks, you are probably right! But it gets much much better with time.
Full text link: https://core.ac.uk/reader/82914509?utm_source=linkout
