The crying infant

Abstract: . Birgitta Wikander, Depertment of Clinical Neurosciences,Stress Research Section, Karolinska Institute and National Institute ofPsychosocial Factors and Health, Stockholm, Sweden.The crying infant. The study is focused on the Child HealthCentres'(CHC:s) daily work of understanding families as well as givingadvice to parents of excessively crying infants.Excessively crying infants were identified by means of a short questionnairedistributed to the mothers of newborn infants visiting the CHC. A diary wasused for the mother's exploration of patterns of crying, sleeping,wakefulness, eating and medication. An interview was carried out with theparents when the infant was between six months and one year old. Thegroup studied consisted of 122, 36 "crying" and 86 "non-crying" infants.Analyses were performed in order to throw light on factors of importance to"subjective" according to mothers experience and "objective" according todiary, amount of crying. Correlated to "objective" crying were: The father'sage, the father's experience of his wife's recent delivery, previous siblings inthe family and the mother's emotional feelings. Correlated to "subjective"crying were amount of pain-relief during delivery and the mother's emotionalfeelings. There was a "mismatch" between "subjective" and "objective""crying" and "non-crying". The urinary daytime excretion of freecatecholamines was assessed in 17 mothers three times after delivery; afterthree weeks, six weeks and six months respectively. Relatively high levelswere found on the first and third occasions, with significantly lowered levelson the second one. Whether the mother experienced her infant as crying ornot had no significant association with catecholamine output. Mothers whohad a negative experience of their delivery as well as mothers who felt tiredduring the mid phase of the follow-up had very small variations incatecholamine excretion and lacked the increase in levels six months afterdelivery observed in the other mothers.A question focused on the fathers' experience of the delivery showed thatbehind the report of bad experiences were events of complications with themother or infant during delivery, feelings of helplessness, bad behaviour ofthe staff, feelings of guilt.A question focused on the feelings that the mothers of "crying" infants hadwhen leaving the infant to another caregiver, for example a grandmother,showed that these mothers cannot be relaxed and enjoy themselves in thissituation. Results from an interview with CHC nurses suggests that thenurses in CHC are purposefully working to develop a positive relationshipwith parents. They sometimes have a paternalistic approach. Theirknowledge of research going on in the field is good but a suspiciousnesstowards the findings is obvious.Key words: Crying infant, mother-infant relationship, fathers' experience ofdelivery, mothers' stress, advice, diary, locus of control.