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A Mom’s Anxiety “Ain’t” the Answer for Colic
Colicky infants are born, not made.
Dr. Martin Stein, Encounters with Children
It’s common for mothers of irritable babies to feel jealous and self-
critical when they see other moms with easy-to-calm infants. Those
feelings can cast a shadow over a woman’s confidence and make her
wonder if her anxiety causes her baby’s crying.
Fortunately, during the first few months of life babies aren’t able to
tell when their mothers are distressed and worried. Remember, babies are
just babies! They are not born with the ability to read their mother’s
feelings as if they were messages written on her forehead in lipstick.
These little prehistoric creatures even have trouble … burping. So don’t

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worry about your baby being affected by your anxiety.
Also, new parents sometimes mistakenly assume their newborns are
nervous because their hands tremble, their chins quiver, and they startle
at sudden sounds or movements. However, those reactions are normal
signs of a newborn’s undeveloped nervous system and automatically
disappear after about three months.
In my experience, however, there are a few ways a mother’s anxiety
about her fussy infant could unintentionally nudge her baby into more
crying:
Anxiety might lessen the mother’s breast-milk supply or
interfere with her milk letdown, thus frustrating a hungry
baby. (See
Chapter 14
to remedy these feeding problems.)
A mother may be so distracted and depressed that she’s
emotionally unavailable to comfort her crying infant.
An anxious mother may be afraid to handle her baby as
vigorously as is necessary to calm the screaming. (See the
discussion about “Vigor” in
Chapter 7
.)
Nervous moms tend to jump impatiently from one calming
method to another. They can get so lost in their anxiety they
don’t notice they’re upsetting their babies even more.
However, when you carefully study the issue of maternal anxiety, it’s
clear that it can’t be making a million of our babies cry for hours every
day. The nervous-mommy theory fails to explain three colic
characteristics: