You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The simple question in the title, usually asked in a despairing way, evokes diverse and complex answers.
Excessively crying infants are approximately 10% of the infant population as described by Wolke and Gray (1989) and St James-Roberts (1989), and 10% is also the figure given in the longitudinal study made in New York by Thomas . For newborns and 7-week-old infants who show temperamental difficulty by fussing and crying during the day, Wolke and St James-Roberts (1987) conclude that there is only low to moderate agreement between multi-method measurements and therefore no commonly identifiable “difficult” infant in the early weeks of life. Conversely, infants with “colic” syndrome have been identified in 26% of all cases as quoted by St James-Roberts (1989) in 21% described by Illingworth (1954) and 30% by Torup (1952).
In my clinical practice with cases referred for infant/parent difficulties, 45 out of 452 cases have been referred for crying alone, and 91 for crying mixed with other complaints, such as feeding and sleeping.
Clearly there are other disturbances of crying behaviour in infancy that are clinically important. It is interesting to note that in my general clinical practice the four most disturbed children that I treated showed an absence of crying behaviour in infancy and then in treatment cried in a way that was unrelated to what was actually happening in the session. In this paper, however, I am concentrating on children referred at least in part for excessive crying.
This is a retrospective analysis of all the cases of excessive crying that I have seen. Firstly I consider specific individual characteristics and secondly extrapolate general points to bear in mind when treating cases of this nature. I shall examine briefly the circumstances of the individuals who interact at the beginning of the problem, namely mother, baby and father, to see whether these follow certain patterns. I shall also examine the characteristics of ps