What Is Colic? Six Possible Reasons That Can Provoke Digestive Discomfort In Infants.
A baby that is having intestinal cramps, or painful gas passing through the bowels, or having difficulty processing and digesting food or having digestive problems is sometimes found to suffer from what is referred to as colics. About 1 baby in 5 will get them, and among those that do there are those that will violently rebel against this pain and express their inability to cope with this situation by very loud and persistent crying. Sometimes, the crying will turn into what seem to be screams of anger.
At this point, the infant sometimes will not accept cuddles or soothing until its discomfort goes away and in most cases, this rebellion is a way of asking his parents to help him/her learn how to cope with the adversity of pain. Medicine has not been able to solve the problem with a pill or a syrup and it is not yet known why this problem exists, nor what causes it.
The most common possible causes of intestinal discomfort that we know of will often be ascribed to these:
- Gas: too much air in the bowels.
- Allergy: difficult digestion of certain food types.
- Reflux: baby’s stomach is still adapting to processing food.
- Gassy foods: some foods create gas in the digestive tract while being processed.
- Incomplete burping. After the first burp, there is often a second one.
- Incompatible bottles that cause too much air swallowing.
Once the cycle of baby screaming starts, it is difficult to break from it. But there is a large amount of tricks and tips derived from past experience that can come to the rescue to help try and cope with the situation, the knack is in finding the right balance of “action” ingredients that are the best fit for parent and child. This can be difficult to find at first.
What is important to know, above all, is that learning to cope with pain and adversity early in life will be transmitted from parent to child and is absolutely vital to the child’s well being for the future. Depriving a baby of love will not help, neither will allowing him to throw his tantrum all the time. The two extremes have to be reconciled by finding the middle road.
This helps the child understand that one has to learn to deal with the problem, that one is abundantly loved and that rebelling against the situation is not productive, on the contrary, it will only aggravate the situation. All this cannot be explained to a newborn, it has to be transmitted through patient tender loving caring action from the parents.
Sometimes exhaution will drive some parents to extremes. This is when sometimes a parent will try to litteraly shake some sense into the baby and the baby is harmed. Unfortunately, it is the most common reason that causes babies to be harmed and this is referred to as the “Shaken Baby Syndrome”. Almost always the parent had no intention of harming their children, but it happens nonetheless.
There are cases when doctors feel it is necessary to inform authorities when they have a case of shaken baby syndrome and sometimes authorities will proscecute the abusing party. In other cases it has been found that nannies were responsible.
What parents need to know is that it is not their fault, that they are not inadequate and that there is no need to feel guilty about the situation. That will allow them to take a step back to review the situation, gather their strength to organize a colic battle plan and get to work finding the solution that will solve the screaming baby situation.
