Emily Oster

3 min Read Emily Oster

Emily Oster

Wins, Woes, and Colic

Your stories for the week

Emily Oster

3 min Read

Wins and Woes is our community newsletter — a place for your stories and questions, where you can connect directly with other ParentData readers.


We’re back with three of your stories and a question about the temperament of colicky babies when they get older

As always, this is your space, so please leave a comment for any of your fellow readers.

Happy, calm Cribsheet baby

Thomas screamed bloody murder for six to seven hours a day for the first six weeks, but then we swapped from breastfeeding to hypoallergenic formula (insert mom guilt, then went back to Cribsheet/Expecting Better to talk sense into myself). Before, we were in the “We love you but we don’t like you” camp, as well as the “What the hell did we get ourselves into?!” realm. Within 24 hours of the swap to the special formula, he was a different baby. Happy! Calm! Parenting win for sure.

Thank you, Mom

My husband has been away for a week, and it’s been rough. We have two under 2, and my six-month-old has had back-to-back ear infections. In the middle of all this, my almost-2-year-old started saying “Thank you,” something we do but haven’t instructed her to do! She thanked me for a glass of orange juice and gave me a kiss on my leg. A moment of sweetness and appreciation I didn’t realize I needed.

Wrestling Emotions

I am wrestling with my emotions over the results of my daughter’s recent autism screening. To me, she is perfect, but the screenings make me feel like I am constantly grading her performance. I feel both like it is my responsibility to monitor her and that it is not the dynamic I want to exist between us. I am also struggling with my feelings about expanding our family, because the data on autism recurrence is unclear. All of this has led to extreme guilt on my end.

This week’s reader question

Illustration of a colicky baby growing into a crying child, crying young adult, crying adult, and crying elderly person.

Rachel Deutsch

My son is 10 weeks old and colicky. He seems unhappy so much of the time, and trust me, we’ve tried all the things. I’m not sure how we’re going to survive. Amid all the crying, my biggest worry is — do colicky/fussy babies grow into unhappy children and adults? I’m looking for data and also maybe some anecdotes from other readers who have been there.

—An exhausted first-time mom

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