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Some 6 week old babies cry for hours every afternoon, which is exhausting for new moms.

Find out how long the witching hour lasts and soothing tips for your fussy newborn. Plus advice on how to calm and relax your 1-3 month old baby. And, check out the free guides below!

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Transcription:

If you’ve got a baby who’s just around the 6 week mark, and suddenly in the evening she’s just crying for no reason. It’s become really, really hard to settle her. First of all, know that it is completely normal.

It’s usually due to 2 different things:
• Your baby often has a growth spurt at 6 weeks old, which makes her more hungry.

• Cognitive development: Your baby is no longer having that deep newborn sleep – she’s waking up more and noticing her environment. She may be smiling socially. By the end of the day, she’s a bit overwhelmed and overstimulated.

The good news is that it usually peaks around 6 weeks old, and it’s usually just a handful of days until it dies back down. But the period of the ‘witching hour’ can last anywhere from 3-10 weeks.


Breastfed Babies:
When your baby is breastfeeding, what happens is that your baby wants to cluster feed. So your baby wants to feed a lot more in the evening hours, while he’s fussy.

The BEST thing you can do for him is to give him uninhibited access to the breast! Let him feed for as long as he wants during these evening hours.

Tip: Prepare dinner early! You can prepare it in the morning or in the early afternoon. Chop everything, put it in the fridge so that all you have to do is heat it up.


Bottle-fed Babies:
If your baby is bottle-feeding, you can either give him a smaller feed more often, or you can give him a pacifier.

In between feeds, you know your baby isn’t really hungry. But he just wants to suck. That’s completely normal! Sucking is a baby’s number 1 way of soothing. So I would definitely introduce a pacifier during this evening fussiness if your baby is bottle-fed.


Breastfed & bottle-fed babies:
A perfect way to calm your baby is to do skin to skin. During the evening is the perfect time to do this. Have your shirt off, have your baby just in a diaper. Sit down together on the sofa and have loads of skin-to-skin, because it can really help your baby settle and relax.

You can also wear your baby in a baby carrier if you need to be doing things, you need to be hands-free.


Use White Noise:
Remember, the in-utero environment is really quite loud! They say it’s as loud as a vacuum cleaner running. So you can try to make your baby’s environment be as similar to the in-utero environment as possible. You can take his white noise machine into the living room, crank it up, and use that to settle him.


Baby Massage
You can also do baby massage. That works well to relax babies. If you sign up to my free Exhausted Mom’s Survival Kit, you’ll get access to my video on baby massage. That works really, really well.


The 5 S's:
Doctor Harvey Karp wrote the book called, ‘The Happiest Baby on the Block’. He’s got a great system for settling young babies during the Witching Hour. It’s called the 5 S’s:
• Swaddle your baby to replicate the cosy womb
• Put them in a side-lying position
• Swing them back and forth with your arms, or move your body forwards and backwards
• Shushing sound (white noise)
• Sucking – give your baby your finger, a pacifier or let them breastfeed

If you can do all these 5 S’s together, it really can help overstimulated, fussy babies calm down.
The way to decipher what the root cause of your baby’s fussiness is like this:

• If your baby is ONLY fussy during the evening, then more than likely it’s the Witching Hour that’s to blame. So the tips I’ve just gone over are bound to help your little one.

• If your baby is fussy all day long, always grizzly and tired, then more than likely your baby is having awake times that are too long. It’s more of a scheduling issue.


If any of you guys have tips on how you survived the Witching Hour, then please do post them under this video!

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