Parents told not to stress out if their baby cries

Britons urged to learn from more relaxed approach Germans and Danes take to newborns

Anxious parents who rush to comfort a crying baby could be compounding the problem, a study has found. Scientists said infants in countries such as Germany and Denmark, where parents take a relaxed approach to crying babies, fared better than in Britain, where parents worried more.

IT MAY be a natural instinct for anxious new parents, but rushing to comfort a crying baby may do more harm than good.

A study suggested that taking a more relaxed approach to distressed infants would benefit them in the long run – and that British parents have the most to learn, as their babies cry more than in almost any other country.

Researchers at Warwick University analysed data on almost 8,700 children to assess how upsetting babies in different countries found their first 12 weeks of life.

With the exception of Canada, babies in the UK cried longer than those anywhere else in the industrialised world, in stark contrast to their counterparts in Denmark and Germany, where crying levels were the lowest.

The authors of the study, which is published in the Journal of Pediatrics, found that German and Danish parents were more relaxed about their babies and were more likely to wait a minute or two after they began crying before picking them up.

British parents spent less time holding their infants overall, but were quicker to snatch them up when they showed signs of distress, possibly entrenching their propensity to sound off.

The differences in parenting approaches may account for the fact that 28 per cent of British infants suffered from colic, which is defined as crying for more than three hours a day for at least three days a week, behind only Canada at 34 per cent and ahead of Italy at 21 per cent. Colic rates in Denmark and Germany, by contrast, were 6 and 7 per cent respectively.

Prof Dieter Wolke, who led the research, said: “German and Danish parents are much less likely to get worked up and they will wait a little bit before they intervene to see if the baby can self-soothe. They don’t get all worried about it.”

Across all the countries examined for the survey, babies cried for an average of two hours per day in the first two weeks after birth.

Crying peaked at about two hours and 15 minutes each day at six weeks of age, before gradually reducing to an average of one hour and 10 minutes.

Previous research has indicated that around 40 per cent of infant crying is inconsolable, and Prof Wolke said many new mothers and fathers were unduly

‘It’s the same principle as going on a plane. You are told to put your oxygen mask on before helping others’

stressed by some “unscientific” parenting books which offered bogus solutions. Concern in Britain over crying babies cost the NHS an estimated £70 million each year, he said, with stressed-out parents more likely to reinforce a pattern of crying.

“It’s the same principle as going on a plane,” he said. “You are told to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. If you are not relaxed you are not going to be any use to your baby.”

He added that adult well-being surveys consistently put Denmark as one of the happiest countries in the world, so Danish babies may enjoy some “genetic bias” whereby they cry less.

“The new chart of normal fuss/cry amounts in babies across industrialised countries will help healthcare professions to reassure parents whether a baby is crying within the normal expected range in the first three months or shows excessive crying which may require further evaluation and extra support for the parents,” he said.

What is it about being born in Britain that causes babies to cry so copiously? Would newborns rather have arrived elsewhere? In Denmark, perhaps, or Japan? That seems to be the conclusion from research which suggest British babies wail the longest of any in the industrialised world. In parts of Asia and – inevitably – Scandinavia, tots are altogether more content, bawling much less frequently than ours. Happily, there is nothing the matter with British babies. Instead, the answer seems to be that anxious mothers and fathers in this country rush to comfort their screaming infants, instead of letting them soothe themselves, and so perpetuate the problem. Struggling parents often feel a vague sense of guilt. How reassuring finally to have the proof that, from the very beginning, as Larkin suspected, they are indeed to blame.