Elijah had colic for a month. Here's what I got wrong.

Somewhere around week two I ended up in Boots at nine in the morning, reading the back of a box of colic drops like I was revising for something. I'd already bought a different box the week before. That one was still on the windowsill above the sink, mostly full.

Elijah's our first. He had colic for about a month, and if you've had a colicky baby you already know the shape of the evening — the one where it starts at five and you look up and somehow it's ten past nine and you've been walking in a circle round the kitchen island the whole time.

We tried everything. Gripe water. Two different kinds of drops. A probiotic my sister-in-law swore by. Bicycle legs, swaddling, white noise off YouTube, the tumble dryer thing, driving him round the block at eleven at night in November. My wife got quite good at a hold she'd found on Instagram where you sort of drape them over your forearm.

None of it did anything. And every time something didn't work there was this small horrible drop, because you'd let yourself hope a bit.

What the NHS actually says about all that stuff

I only looked this up properly afterwards, which tells you something about the state I was in at the time.

The NHS colic page says, in plain words, that anti-colic drops, gripe water, herbal remedies and probiotic supplements aren't recommended and there's no evidence they help. It also specifically warns against cranial osteopathy and spinal manipulation — little evidence it works, and it may hurt your baby. We'd been within about a week of booking a cranial osteopath. Someone at a baby group had said it changed everything for them.

I don't think anyone was being dishonest with us. Every single recommendation came from someone who loved us and had been through it. But a knackered parent at nine at night is about the easiest sell on earth, and there's an entire aisle in every chemist that knows it.

Here's the bit that really got me, though, and I didn't understand it until later. Colic starts at a few weeks, peaks around six to eight weeks, and goes away on its own by three or four months. So whatever you happen to be trying the week your baby turns ten weeks old is going to look like the thing that fixed it. That's not people lying about their miracle cure. They just genuinely can't tell, and neither could I.

Then we started writing things down

Not for any clever reason. We started logging because we'd got to the point of properly bickering about whether he'd been fed, and at four in the morning neither of us could be trusted.

But after about a week of it, we noticed something. The crying wasn't spread out over the day at all, which is what it felt like. It was crammed into a block from roughly five to nine, more or less every day. And the worst nights followed the feeds where he'd conked out on the breast and gone straight down without being burped properly.

That's not a fact about colic. It's a fact about Elijah. But it was the first time in a month we'd had anything to actually go on instead of just reacting.

So we changed two things, and they were both boring. We got serious about winding him — properly, for way longer than felt reasonable, instead of the couple of optimistic pats we'd been doing. And we stopped putting him straight down after the evening feeds and held him upright for a bit first.

Both of those turn out to be things the NHS suggests anyway: hold your baby upright during feeding so they swallow less air, and let them finish one breast before you offer the other. We could have known that in week one.

To be clear, burping didn't cure anything

I want to be careful here, because I know what it's like to read this stuff at midnight and think you've found the answer.

Burping doesn't cure colic. Nobody knows what causes colic — the NHS is blunt about that, and the old assumption that it's all trapped wind isn't backed by evidence. And I can't actually prove the winding did anything for Elijah rather than him just growing out of it roughly on schedule. Which is exactly the trap I was banging on about two paragraphs ago. One baby is not a study, and I'm aware I've written a thousand words about a sample size of one.

What I'd actually stand behind isn't the burping. It's the switch from "how do I stop this crying" to "when does this crying happen, and what's different about the times it doesn't." The first question doesn't have an answer. The second one might, and it'll be specific to your kid.

First, though — make sure it is colic

This is the bit where I'd rather be boring than clever.

Colic is a diagnosis of exclusion. It's what's left after a doctor has checked for everything else. Which means "it's probably just colic" is a perfectly sensible thing for a GP to conclude and a genuinely risky thing for a parent to decide on their own at home.

The bit nobody puts in the group chat

Week three, some night I couldn't tell you the date of. He'd been going for nearly two hours and I noticed I was holding him too tightly. Not shaking him, nothing like that. Just gripping. And it frightened me enough that I put him down in the cot, went out into the hallway and shut the door, and stood there for a bit.

I felt like the worst father in England. I told my wife about it maybe three weeks later.

Turns out it's common enough that the NHS runs a whole campaign about it, which I wish somebody had mentioned to me on the ward instead of me finding it at 2am on my phone.

And if the tiredness is turning into something heavier — you're low a lot of the time, or anxious, or you just can't seem to get on top of it — please say something to your health visitor or GP. The colic itself is a few weeks. The state it leaves you in can hang around a lot longer than that, and there's no prize for not mentioning it.

The chart that finally shut me up

This is the part I didn't expect to matter, and it ended up mattering more than any of it.

When you're inside it you genuinely cannot tell if things are improving. Every evening feels the same as the last one, because every evening is horrible, and one bad Tuesday completely wipes out your memory of a half-decent Monday. My wife kept saying he was getting better. I was convinced he wasn't and, if I'm honest, slightly annoyed that she kept saying it.

We were both just guessing. She was right.

We were never logging the crying, by the way — you're not reaching for your phone while you're marching a screaming baby up and down a hallway. But we were logging sleep, and it turns out a colicky evening shows up in the sleep chart as a great hole where the sleep should be. That first week, between five and nine, Elijah slept about ten minutes. Total. The gap was the colic, just drawn from the other side.

By week four the dip was still there. Evenings were still his worst time, and honestly they stayed his worst time for a while after that. But it had come up off the floor — ten minutes had turned into something more like an hour and a half, and he was going down for the night noticeably earlier.

Putting those two weeks next to each other in Insights did something that no amount of "it'll pass, love" from anybody had managed. It didn't stop him crying that evening. It just meant that for the first time I believed we were coming out the other side, because I could see it rather than being told it.

That was what we needed in the end. Not a cure. Just some evidence.

He's fine now, obviously. Sleeps better than I do.

Related: How much should a newborn sleep?

Sources: NHS guidance on colic and crying babies, and the ICON programme on coping with infant crying.

This article describes one family's experience alongside general information, and is not medical advice. Every baby is different. If you're worried about your baby's crying, feeding or health, contact your health visitor or GP — or call 111 out of hours.