Crying infants ‘at higher risk of child abuse’
Dr Linda Gilkerson, executive director of the US-based Fussy Baby Network, said parents are consumed by what it is that makes their baby cry and it is one of the most common questions asked of public health nurses.
Dr Gilkerson, a professor at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, was speaking at a national conference organised by the Health Service Executive South, entitled Baby in Mind.
In her speech Crying for Help: Can you hear me? Dr Gilkerson said crying generally peaks when a baby is four to six weeks old, but can continue for longer in “fussy” babies.
“These are the babies with colic, with reflux, the irritable babies who don’t settle after a couple of months.”
Continuous crying caused great stress for many parents, Dr Gilkerson said, disrupting lives, causing marital discord, causing maternal depression in up to 40% of cases and leading to social isolation.
“Parents get shy about going out. The normal tricks that help out with crying don’t seem to help them. They hear the same advice over and over from those who mean well, but in the end, it causes them to withdraw because they don’t want to hear it again.”
A second speaker, Antoine Guedeney, a Paris-based Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and president elect of the World Association of Infant Mental Health, said babies do not suffer from depression but it is possible that toddlers do.
In his talk entitled ‘Do babies get depressed?’, he said it was unlikely that depression existed before the baby was 18-24 months old. However, he said infants could suffer withdrawal.
“When the baby has no caretaker other than the main caretaker and where that relationship is highly unpredictable, it can cause withdrawal behaviour in babies,” said Prof Guedeney. He said children whose mothers were depressed could also withdraw.
“If a child remains withdrawn, they are at a high risk of developing a depressive disorder later on,” he said.
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