The Pankian Metaphor 3037

The swaddling techiques are mostly useful for the first few months.

Yes, and is it ever a precious commodity. Early on its not unusual for the infant to wake up every couple hours, be awake for a couple, then back to sleep- or just cry and scream all night- or sometimes sleep the night through which might happen here and there. Any technique that promotes and-or prolongs sleep is prized because the parent's sleep is directly proportional to the infant's.

It doesn't appear so. Infants can get bored in which case they fuss despite everything you do. A locale change is a good anti-boredom technique, down the list a bit but quite important. Just yesterday I forgot to try it... wife remembered, worked like a charm.

My theory is swaddling keeps them from flinging their arms about & disturbing themselves and the "clasp" of the fabric simulates being held, thus soothing them. Left free, infants will fling their arms about with abandon- or "start" as they fall asleep and wake themselves up.

At bedtimes sometime you have to leave them to cry in bed for a hour or so before they'll go to sleep. Other times you have to intervene and work on them for a while- in those cases 5 minutes of soothing could put them right out. But you don't want to habituate the child into crying to get you to come up and attend to them once they're in bed and the bedtime procedures are complete. Its a judgement call so you end up trying to perceive the little cues that suggest whats upsetting them. Some degree of swaddling is helpful because it loads the dice in favor of them going to sleep more easily.

Colic is not a well specified problem. The symptom is an unconsolable infant but the causes are not well defined. I think its largely buttociated with intestinal discomfort due to food in the immature digestive tract- leading to gas, cramping, indigestion. With our daughter her colic seemed to switch on at about 2 wks and switch off at about 2 months. Probably the latter was more of a rapid fading over the course of a few days, but the former was almost literally overnight.

There are myriad "cures" for colic featuring all kinds of crazy stuff, we tried quite a few- none of which offered more than the appearance of momentary relief and most did nothing. The most bizarre was an activated charcoal suspension that you put in a special pacifier which would be consumed as the infant "nurses" the pacifier. Didn't do a thing for the colic and made her spitup black which of course got all over the place.

The anti-gas drops put in the bottle with food did help somewhat, but changing formulas did not. One formula change made it dramatically worse. Breast feeding didn't help either.

Due to the time it takes for food to traverse the digestive tract, the feedback loop takes a few days to complete- making systematic observations difficult.

All that said, sometimes infants are difficult other times they're happy- just like people.

Gregm