Why Does My Baby Cry Every Evening?

For the first six weeks of my daughter's life I was convinced that something happened to her at five o'clock in the afternoon. She was a perfectly reasonable baby all day, and then the light went, and so did she. This is so common that somebody has given it a name, the witching hour, which tells you roughly how seriously it has ever been studied, and it isn't an hour, I've never met anybody for whom it was an hour, but it's real, it's predictable to the point of being almost punctual, and it peaks at around six weeks, which means that if you're reading this at six weeks you're standing at the top of the curve looking down the far side without knowing it.

It ends. Nobody said that to me with any conviction, so it goes at the beginning.

What's driving it

Nobody knows exactly why. Keep that in mind when somebody sells you a remedy. What we have is six things that turn up again and again, and they all point the same way: by evening, a very new nervous system has run out of road.

• Accumulated overtiredness. Naps in the first months are short and frequently terrible, and by evening your baby has built a sleep debt she has no way of paying off. Overtiredness makes settling harder, which is the cruellest arithmetic in early parenthood.
• Accumulated overstimulation. A whole day of light, noise, faces and handling reaches a threshold at some point, and the evening is where it surfaces.
• Cluster feeding. Many babies feed almost continuously from late afternoon, coming on and off and looking thoroughly dissatisfied with the service. This is normal behaviour and I'll come back to it, because it's the single thing that frightened me most.
• The evening milk. Breast milk composition shifts across the day, and evening feeds are smaller and to take more work for less obvious reward.
• Household tempo. Evening is when the adults are tired, hurried and often outnumbered, and babies read the temperature of a room with unnerving accuracy.
• Immature regulation. A young nervous system has very little capacity to settle itself, and by seven in the evening whatever capacity it had is spent.

Cluster feeding isn't a sign your milk has failed

Almost every breastfeeding mother arrives at that conclusion at around eight o'clock in the evening in week three. I arrived at it on schedule, sat on the floor of my own bedroom, reading about formula on my phone with one hand.

Almost all of us are wrong. A baby who feeds constantly all evening, comes off, cries, and goes straight back on is doing something ordinary and probably helpful, and frequent evening feeding is followed by a longer stretch of sleep afterwards. The frequency is what drives supply up. It isn't evidence that supply is down.

Judge your supply on the things that measure it. From about a week old you're looking for six or more heavy wet nappies a day, at least two yellow stools, and steady weight gain, and if those three are in order the evening is telling you nothing whatsoever about your milk.

Nobody told me that and I lost most of a fortnight to it. If a health visitor or a lactation consultant is available to you, this is exactly what they'll settle in ten minutes.

What helps

None of this will stop it, and I'd be lying if I suggested otherwise. What it does is take the edges off, and on a Tuesday evening in week six that's more than it sounds.

• Bring bedtime earlier. This is entirely counterintuitive and it's the most effective change most families make. An overtired baby is harder to settle, so an earlier start prevents the state altogether.
• Protect the late-afternoon nap, even a short one in a pram or a carrier. A baby who has slept at four o'clock is a visibly different person at seven.
• Go outside at the start of the difficult window. A walk resets the evening more reliably than anything I ever managed indoors.
• Dim the whole flat an hour before. Lights down, television off, voices lower. Reducing the input is the intervention; there's nothing else you need to add.
• Carry her. Upright, chest to chest, moving. Carried babies cry measurably less on average, and this was the only thing that worked for us with any consistency.
• Bath early, if a bath helps. For some babies it settles them and for others it winds them up like a clock, so find out which one you have and plan around it.
• Hand over. Where there are two adults, twenty-minute shifts are far more sustainable than one person absorbing three hours and slowly losing their mind.

What makes it worse

A few things reliably backfire, all for the same reason: they add stimulation to a baby who's already drowning in it.

• Keeping her up so she'll sleep better later. Overtiredness compounds, and the evening gets worse in direct proportion.
• Bouncing harder and faster. Escalating your input to override the crying almost always escalates the crying.
• Switching formula repeatedly, or speculatively cutting foods out of your own diet. Both deserve doing with proper guidance and deserve avoiding without it.
• Most over-the-counter colic remedies, which have weak evidence behind them at best.
• Comparing her to other babies. Evening crying varies enormously between perfectly healthy children and says nothing at all about your baby or about you.

It begins at around two to three weeks, peaks somewhere between six and eight, and fades between three and four months as the nervous system matures and naps begin to consolidate into something recognisable.

A very long time from the inside and no time at all from anywhere else. I'm aware of how little comfort the second half of that sentence offers at the time.

The thing to hold on to is that the peak is the middle of the curve. Week six isn't a preview of week ten. It's the worst of it, and everything after it's downhill.

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The evening shift is the hardest one, and the one most often done alone, which is worth saying because the guides tend to describe it as though two adults were present. In Singapore it tends to land in the gap between whoever helps during the day going home and whoever else lives there getting back from work, two or three hours with nobody in it. I may be wrong about how universal that is, but it was ours.

Eat before it starts, because you won't eat once it has. Take turns if there's anybody to take turns with, and when you need to, put her down somewhere safe and step outside the door for two minutes. Always the right call, and a good deal safer than staying in the room past the point where you can cope.

If the evenings have started producing dread, or rage, or a flat numbness that settles in and doesn't lift, please tell a doctor. It's common, it's treatable, and it isn't a verdict on you as a mother.

When it isn't the witching hour

Everything above assumes a pattern: the same time, most nights, an otherwise well baby who's feeding and growing. These are the signs you're looking at something else. Read them once now so you recognise them later.

• Crying that has spread across the whole day and no longer clusters in the evening.
• Poor weight gain, or noticeably fewer wet nappies than usual.
• Arching, frequent forceful vomiting, or distress during feeds as well as after them.
• Blood or mucus in the stools, or eczema alongside the crying.
• A cry that is high-pitched, weak or simply unlike her usual one, or a temperature of 38°C or above in a baby under three months.
• Crying in episodes with the legs drawn up and vomiting, which needs assessment immediately.

Where this comes from

• NHS. Soothing a crying baby
• NHS: Colic

This guide is general information, written to help you understand a topic and ask better questions. It is not medical advice and does not replace your own doctor, midwife or paediatrician. Anything that worries you about your baby belongs with them.

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