How to Get Your Baby to Stop Crying

Dec. 2 -- At just 5 weeks old, Emerson Thein was crying relentlessly, and her frantic parents believed that something was terribly wrong with their baby girl, whom they had nicknamed Emmy.

"I'm desperate for help and someone to tell me how to help this little baby be a happy girl," Dhari Thein, 34, said in a video diary she recorded for Good Morning America, as she tried to quiet the crying infant. Her husband wasn't having much luck either.

"She's hungry," Dan Thein, 29, says on the tape. But even though they fed the baby, burped her, changed her, rocked her and held her, Emmy did not stop crying.

Her parents told Good Morning America's parenting contributor, Ann Pleshette Murphy, that Emmy had screamed and cried for as long as nine hours at one stretch, and neither of them got more than four hours of sleep a night. Even the family's neighbors in Altadena, Calif., could hear Emmy's piercing shrieks, which actually register on a decibel meter at the same noise level as a lawn mower.

The baby has colic, a condition that is the terror of new parents and somewhat of a puzzle to doctors. Colic is "persistent fussiness that appears for no obvious reason," said Dr. Harvey Karp, a pediatrician who wrote the book The Happiest Baby on the Block, which is also available on video/DVD.

Karp's solution is that parents should learn to swaddle their babies. A study released in the December issue of Pediatrics magazine agrees, saying that swaddling a baby may help them sleep better in a supine position (lying on their back), which is the position recommended to decrease the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The study notes that a safe form of swaddling allows the child's chest wall to move in and out as they breathe, and allows babies to move their hips back and forth comfortably.

Your Baby’s ‘Calming Reflex’

Karp cannot always diagnose why a baby cries, but he says parents can stop it by tapping into what he calls the baby's calming reflex.