Can colic go beyond 12 weeks? Yes it can!

I am often asked what age colic stops? The NHS answer according to their website is at 12 weeks. I am also often asked if it can go on after 12 weeks or start after 12 weeks and my answer is “Yes!”. If you have read Calming Colic you will understand my answer to this. I have put an extract below from my book answering these questions briefly. I do believe there is something in the 12 week mark, if you haven’t done anything else to help your baby’s colic then there is a good chance that it will go. I think this has something to do with the maturity of the babies gut, in basic terms their tubes have got bigger and are coping better. However, there could easily be a number of factors causing the colic that don’t improve because of this simple timeline. I have covered these and what to do about them in the book. Bottom line though, using the solutions in Calming Colic you won’t have to wait anywhere near 12 weeks anyway!

What age does colic stop?

I quoted above an excerpt from the NHS website about this, here it is again:

“The symptoms of colic usually begin within the first few weeks of life, and usually resolve by the time the baby is four months of age, and by six months at the latest.”

The classic time colic is meant to stop according to orthodox medicine is 12 weeks. However, I hope you have now learnt that this is not always the case. What if at 14 weeks your baby has to take antibiotics which deplete its own friendly gut bacteria, causing incorrect digestion of milk and resulting in wind which manifests as colic? What if you haven’t read this ebook and hadn’t realised that a cow’s milk formula could possibly be the cause behind colic—if you continued using the formula past 12 weeks, the colic will also continue; if you swap from breastfeeding to formula milk then the colic may start at 12 weeks! What if the traumatic birth with forceps caused compression through the skull which is irritating the baby? All these things will mean that the colic can potentially last longer than the much quoted 12 weeks.