When acute, unexplained crying lasts longer than 40 minutes, take your baby's temperature, check her for swollen gums, and undress her to look for areas of redness on her skin, swelling, or something in her clothing that may be irritating her, like a tag or pin. Call your pediatrician if you find anything out of the ordinary. Infants love motion and closeness to a warm body-something they enjoyed in the womb. Research has also shown the power of smooth, deliberate touch. In studies on premature infants, those who were massaged for 15 minutes three times as day for 10 days gained weight more quickly and were more active, alert, and responsive than those preemies who weren't massaged.
Massage is also a helpful tool for promoting relaxation in full-term infants.
At first, don't massage your baby when he's crying-wait until you're both relaxed because you don't want him to associate the massage with bad feelings, like frustration or exhaustion. Then, gently rub his back, belly, arms, and legs with loving strokes. To perfect your technique, take a class or read one of the many books now available on the art of infant massage. After a week or two, when your baby has come to associate massage with relaxation, you can use massage to calm and soothe him when he cries. If it seems that every evening, just when you're tying get supper on the table, the baby acts up, a mechanical sing may help.