Objective confirmation of crying durations in infants referred for excessive crying

Parents commonly seek clinicians' help for infant crying that they judge to be excessive. To date there is no independent evidence whether such babies actually cry more than average. To assess this, maternal diary and 24 hour audiotape recordings of the crying periods of 16 infants referred for excessive crying were compared with equivalent measures of a normative sample. The overall amounts of crying measured by the two methods were similar. The referred infants cried substantially more over 24 hours and in the afternoon and evening. The difference approached significance in the morning but was insignificant at night time. Some qualifications to the findings are indicated.