Support for difficult babies

Support for difficult babies

At the practice, we regularly treat babies who have developed all sorts of difficulties within the first few weeks of birth.

In last few weeks we’ve seen a couple of really troubled babies who had particularly deliveries, requiring intervention and also needing follow up care in Special Care Baby Unit and a longer stay in hospital.

Some of the symptoms they’ve had were: constant crying, needing to be held and jigged all the time with increased distress at being put down, needing sleep on a parent, not sleeping well in the day or night, difficulties with their latch and taking a long time feeding, as well as painful colic. Not much fun : (Both have wonderful but exhausted parents).

When difficult situations become overwhelming for humans, we respond by our more animal nature and go into the survival modes of flight, fight or freeze. We produce a lot of stress hormones to give us the energy to escape but if we can’t get away this animal part of our brain can get locked into a stress response. This can make our nervous system overstimulated and over sensitive to normal stressors like being put down for a few minutes and can make it very difficult to relax.

When we try to help babies like this, our first focus is aimed at calming down the tension in their musculoskeletal system to help ease their highly activated nervous systems and turn down their stress hormone production. Sometimes it can help to work with Mum, and Dad too, as it is very stressful having a stressed baby.

Happily both these babies are beginning to calm down and we look forward to aiming our techniques at some of the more normal symptoms we try to help.

If you have a baby that’s not settling, why not give us a call to see if osteopathy could help.

Jeni

8 April 2013