Barr – PURPLE crying

You know, I must get asked that question about how do you get through this early increased crying period more than any other question in my whole professional life. There’s probably no more compelling question once people find out that I have any interest at all in the crying of infants is to how to get through it. And part of the reason is not surprising. It turns out that the characteristics that crying has in the first three to five months of life are unique to the first three to five months of life. And they all have the capacity to frustrate caregivers. So if I can go through a few of those just to remind you, and we try to capture these in the phrase “the period of purple crying”. Not because the infants turn purple, although they sometimes do when they cry a lot. But rather because the letters of the word purple each refer to one of these six properties which is frustrating and specific to the first few weeks of life, months of life.  

The first P refers to the fact that in general, and most parents who have especially high-crying infants will know this, that the crying tends to increase in the first two months of life and then reaches a kind of a peak and then begins to decrease over the next two or three months of life. 

Now for any particular infant they might increase quickly and decline more quickly or take a longer time to increase and decline but in general the maximum amount of crying occurs during the second week of life. Now any behavior that is in a sense negative, that increases no matter how good a caregiver you are, no matter what you do, is extraordinarily frustrating. And that’s exactly the character that crying has and because of this early peak pattern crying can be terribly frustrating to mothers or any caregiver at all. 

The second characteristic is that part of this crying is inconsolable crying jags, if you like, or bouts of crying that go for minutes to hours sometimes, up to two to three hours is not uncommon and some infants can cry much longer than that and still be completely normal. 

But these crying jags come and go for no apparent reason and unrelated to anything in the environment. 

Contrary to common expectations it’s not related to wet diapers, it’s not related to feeding; these crying jags come and go on their own with no apparent explanation. So that can be frustrating as you can imagine. 

Thirdly, they’re resistant to soothing, and that’s the R in the word purple. No matter what you do, drive them around the block, feed them, they’ll calm down just a little bit for just a small period of time, as soon as that’s over they start crying again. 

The second P is for the fact that when they’re crying like this they look as if they’re in pain even though pain isn’t part of the story. And there’s no way you can tell from the facial grimness or from the sound of their voice whether they’re in pain or not but they seem to be. 

The L refers to the fact that these bouts are long lasting. I’ve already alluded to the fact there can be three to five hours of crying per day but individual bouts can last for 35 to 45 minutes, on average and often up to two hours and more.  

And finally, even though we don’t know exactly when the crying’s going to happen, it tends to cluster in the evening hours, which is what the E refers to. We call this a diurnal rhythm, there tends to be more of it in the evening, less of it during the day. They may cry at any time but it tends to cluster in the evening hours. And as you can imagine, that’s when parents are most frustrated, most tired, when dad comes home from work and he might think that the baby’s just crying because he’s there but actually this diurnal pattern is well recognized and it’s independent of whether dad comes home from work. 

So all of these characteristics are very, very frustrating. They all make us as caregivers seem to be out of control as far as this particularly negative experience is concerned, and there’s nothing that’s more frustrating than things that are beyond our control. We don’t like that. It doesn’t sit well with our understanding of what we should be as good caregivers and to the extent that this is beyond our control that’s very, very frustrating. 

So this understanding that these characteristics are there, that we have inherited them as part of our evolutionary inheritance, that in some contexts they have very positive value in terms of the survival of the infant, like in the Masai infants who were going through a famine, and just remembering that, it’s not our fault if they’re crying, once we’ve done all the usual and wonderfully intuitive caregiving things which we typically do as humans and caregivers. And we need to remember to do that. It is helpful, it is important, but some of the crying is not going to be stopped by that and that however is not our fault. And knowing that there’s an end to it is probably the other most important piece of information that all caregivers need to know. There’s no way that it’s not going to be frustrating. It will be frustrating but it does come to an end and it is normal and it’s not their fault.