The crying infant

The study is focused on the Child Health Centres’ (CHC:s) daily work of understanding families as well as giving advice to parents of excessively crying infants. Excessively crying infants were identified by means of a short questionnaire distributed to the mothers of newborn infants visiting the CHC. A diary was used for the mother's exploration of patterns of crying, sleeping, wakefulness, eating and medication. An interview was carried out with the parents when the infant was between six months and one year old.

The group 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 to diary, amount of crying. Correlated to "objective" crying were: The father’s age, the father’s experience of his wife’s recent delivery, previous siblings in the family and the mother’s emotional feelings. Correlated to "subjective" crying were amount of pain-relief during delivery and the mother’s emotional feelings. There was a "mismatch" between "subjective" and "objective" crying and non-crying. The urinary daytime excretion of free catecholamines was assessed in 17 mothers three times after delivery; after three weeks, six weeks and six months respectively. Relatively high levels were found on the first and third occasions, with significantly lowered levels on the second one. Whether the mother experienced her infant as crying or not had no significant association with catecholamine output. Mothers who had a negative experience of their delivery as well as mothers who felt tired during the mid phase of the follow-up had very small variations in catecholamine excretion and lacked the increase in levels six months after delivery observed in the other mothers.

A question focused on the fathers’ experience of the delivery showed that behind the report of bad experiences were events of complications with the mother or infant during delivery, feelings of helplessness, bad behaviour of the staff, feelings of guilt. A question focused on the feelings that the mothers of "crying" infants had when leaving the infant to another caregiver, for example a grandmother, showed that these mothers cannot be relaxed and enjoy themselves in this situation. Results from an interview with CHC nurses suggests that the nurses in CHC are purposefully working to develop a positive relationship with parents. They sometimes have a paternalistic approach. Their knowledge of research going on in the field is good but a suspiciousness towards the findings is obvious.