Witching hour
Also called the witching hour, witching hours
The witching hour is the stretch in the late afternoon or evening when many young babies fuss and cry and are hard to settle. It's a parents' name for a pattern pediatricians know well.
How it's said
...during the day and night she happily sleeps in her crib, but during witching hour she's a completely different baby.
"Witching hours" are very normal behaviour for a new baby. It's really hard but really normal, and it will pass...
...he did still "witch" in the evening, but instead of cluster feeding we'd have to soothe with bouncing, rocking, shushing, white noise etc.
Witching hour is just when it's nearly bedtime but not quite and they are tired and grizzly.
Who says it
Not to be confused with
- Colic is the word doctors use when the crying goes on through the day or night, not only in one fussy stretch. The witching hour is the parents' name for that daily evening stretch.
- Purple crying names the whole run of weeks when crying peaks, from about 2 weeks to 3 to 5 months. The witching hour is the time of day, usually the evening, when that crying is at its worst.
- Cluster feeding is the run of close feeds that often fills the same evening hours. The witching hour names the fussing and crying, which can come with the feeds or without them.
Where it came from
The phrase is much older than its baby meaning. In folklore the witching hour is the time of night, often midnight, when witches, demons and ghosts were thought to be at their strongest. It was in print by 1762 and echoes the "witching time of night" in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Over time it became an everyday idiom, and parents took it for the hour or two before bedtime when babies and young children cry for a long time and are hard to settle.
The AAP describes the same pattern without the name: a regular fussy time, often between 6 p.m. and midnight, that peaks at about three hours a day by six weeks and drops to one or two hours a day by three or four months.