Your baby has been relatively content for most of the day. Then late afternoon arrives and suddenly nothing seems to work.
They want to feed, then pull away. You walk around with them, they settle for a few minutes, then start crying again. They fall asleep in your arms, wake ten minutes later and want to feed again. You rock, bounce, cuddle, feed and walk around the house wondering what on earth happened to the baby you had at lunchtime.
Welcome to what parents often call the witching hour – although, rather unfairly, it can last considerably longer than an hour.
It is particularly common during the early weeks of life, and while it can be exhausting, it does not automatically mean that something is wrong with your baby, your milk supply or the way you are helping them sleep.
What is the witching hour?
The witching hour isn’t a medical diagnosis. It is simply a name parents use for a period, usually in the late afternoon or evening, when a young baby becomes noticeably more unsettled. They may cry or fuss more, want almost constant contact, feed repeatedly, sleep only briefly or seem impossible to settle for any meaningful length of time.
Research does show that crying and fussing are relatively high during the early weeks of infancy and tend to decrease as babies get older. You will often hear that crying “peaks at six weeks”, but the evidence is a little more complicated than that. A large systematic review found no evidence of a universal six-week crying peak across populations, although a more recent meta-analysis did find the highest average duration of crying and fussing at around five to six weeks.¹˒²
In other words, increased crying around this age is common, but babies do not follow an identical developmental timetable. There is also evidence that crying can cluster in the evening in some babies.³ But again, this isn’t universal. Culture, caregiving practices, individual temperament and many other factors influence how much babies cry and when they do it.
Why does my baby cry more in the evening?
This is where I would be cautious about very neat explanations.
You may read that your baby has “used up all their coping capacity”, has accumulated too much stimulation during the day or has become severely overtired by evening. These explanations sound plausible, but they can easily turn a normal developmental pattern into another problem for parents to solve.
A young baby’s nervous system is developing rapidly. Sleep and wakefulness are still distributed quite differently from those of an older baby or adult, and the circadian organisation of sleep is only beginning to develop during these early weeks.⁴
Your baby’s evening may therefore look nothing like the bedtime you expect later in infancy. They may feed, doze for fifteen minutes, wake, look around, feed again, cry, fall asleep against you, wake when you put them down and eventually begin their longest period of night-time sleep much later. Those little sleeps still count as sleep.
And the fact that your baby doesn’t settle for “the night” at 7 pm does not mean that you are doing bedtime wrong.
Cluster feeding and the witching hour
Feeding often becomes a big part of these evenings. A breastfed baby may want to return to the breast repeatedly over several hours. A bottle-fed baby may also show periods when feeds seem unusually close together.
For a breastfeeding parent in particular, this can easily create the fear that there isn’t enough milk. “My breasts feel empty.” “He has just fed – he can’t possibly be hungry again.” “She keeps coming off and crying. There must be something wrong with my milk.”
But feeding is not only about transferring a particular number of millilitres of milk at predetermined intervals. Babies also suck for comfort and regulation, and breastfeeding patterns are not necessarily evenly spaced throughout the day. If your baby is otherwise feeding effectively, gaining weight appropriately and producing the expected wet nappies, frequent evening feeding by itself does not tell you that your milk supply is inadequate.
If you are concerned about feeding or weight gain, however, that deserves proper assessment rather than trying to solve the evening crying by changing your baby’s sleep.
Does the witching hour mean my baby is overtired?
Not necessarily. Sometimes your baby will indeed be tired, and helping them sleep is exactly what they need. But I wouldn’t look at an unsettled six-week-old at 7 pm and automatically conclude that the problem must have been a wake window that was fifteen minutes too long at lunchtime.
Young babies have fragmented sleep. They may sleep while feeding, in your arms, in a sling or carrier, in the pram or during a walk. Some of those sleeps may last ten minutes and others two hours.
If we count only the naps that happen in a cot and have a clear beginning and end, we can easily underestimate how much sleep a newborn is actually getting. Rather than trying to reconstruct the entire day to find the moment you supposedly “caused” the difficult evening, look at the baby in front of you.
Are they showing signs that they want to sleep? Help them sleep. Are they asking to feed again? Feed them. Do they calm when you walk or rock them? Use movement. Do they simply want to be held? Hold them.
At this age, feeding, sucking, movement and physical contact are powerful ways of helping babies regulate and settle. You are not creating a bad habit by responding to your baby.
What can actually help during the witching hour?
First, lower your expectations of what the evening is supposed to look like. You do not necessarily need to achieve one perfect feed followed by a bath, a darkened room and a baby peacefully asleep for the night. Sometimes the most useful strategy is simply to accept that, for a few weeks, this part of the day may be messy.
Feed when your baby wants to feed. Use skin-to-skin contact if you both enjoy it. Walk, rock, cuddle or use a sling or carrier. If another trusted adult can settle your baby, hand them over and have something to eat, take a shower or simply have twenty minutes when nobody is touching you.
If your baby falls asleep, you don’t have to worry that they have gone to sleep “too early” or that a ten-minute evening nap will ruin the entire night. And if they wake again shortly afterwards, it doesn’t mean that the settling failed. They slept for ten minutes. For a six-week-old baby, that may simply have been what happened next.
When does the witching hour get better?
For many babies, the intensity of crying and fussing begins to decrease as they move through the first few months.
A 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis involving 8,690 infants found average fussing and crying durations of around 117–133 minutes per day during the first six weeks, falling to about 68 minutes by 10–12 weeks.¹ A later meta-analysis similarly found generally lower crying and fussing durations after the earliest months of infancy.²
Those are population averages, not deadlines for your individual baby. Some babies barely have a noticeable witching hour. Some have difficult evenings for a few weeks. Others remain more intense, sensitive or vocal for considerably longer. Development rarely happens according to a calendar.
When should I be concerned?
Not every crying baby is simply experiencing the witching hour. If your baby’s crying is suddenly very different from usual, they are difficult to wake, have a fever, are having difficulty breathing, are repeatedly vomiting, appear to be in pain, are feeding poorly, have fewer wet nappies, are not gaining weight appropriately, or something about their behaviour makes you feel that they are unwell, seek medical advice.
And if the crying is becoming too much for you, that matters too. Put your baby somewhere safe if you need a few minutes. Ask somebody else to take over when possible. Long periods of crying can be extraordinarily difficult to listen to, particularly when you are exhausted yourself. You do not have to prove that you can cope with it alone.
Your baby isn’t giving you a hard time
The witching hour can make evenings feel endless. You may spend hours feeding, walking, rocking and resettling without ever reaching the point where you feel that the baby is finally “down”. But during these very early weeks, sleep isn’t organised around a neat bedtime followed by a predictable night.
Your baby’s evening may simply be a succession of feeding, contact, short sleeps, wakefulness and more feeding before their longer night-time sleep eventually begins. You can help them through it without turning every difficult evening into a sleep problem that needs fixing.
And if your baby is around six weeks old and sleep itself seems to have suddenly changed as well, read Why Won’t My 6-Week-Old Baby Sleep?
References
- Wolke, D., Bilgin, A., & Samara, M. (2017). Systematic review and meta-analysis: Fussing and crying durations and prevalence of colic in infants. The Journal of Pediatrics, 185, 55–61.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2017.02.020
- Bilgin, A., Wolke, D., & Samara, M. (2022). Crying in the first 12 months of life: A systematic review and meta-analysis of cross-country parent-reported data and modeling of the “cry curve”. Child Development.
- James-Roberts, I. S., Conroy, S., & Hurry, J. (1997). Links between infant crying and sleep-waking at six weeks of age. Early Human Development, 48(1–2), 143–152. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-3782(96)01845-2
- Nishihara, K., Horiuchi, S., Eto, H., & Uchida, S. (2002). The development of infants’ circadian rest-activity rhythm and mothers’ rhythm. Physiology & Behavior, 77(1), 91–98.