The witching hour: why your baby cries every evening (and what helps with twins)

It starts at about the same time every day. Somewhere after five, the baby who napped and fed perfectly well all afternoon turns into someone you do not recognise. Feeding does not fix it, rocking half-fixes it for four minutes, and by nine o'clock you are walking laps of the kitchen wondering what you did wrong.

You did nothing wrong. This is the witching hour, and almost every baby has one.

What is actually going on

Nobody has a single clean explanation, which is part of why it is so maddening. The two that hold up best:

The end of the day is a lot. A newborn's nervous system is still learning to filter light, noise, faces and hunger. By evening the day has piled up, and a tired, overstimulated baby is harder to settle than a rested one. Adults get this too; we just do not scream about it.

Evening cluster feeding. Many babies want short, frequent feeds in the evening, sometimes every half hour. It is a normal pattern, not a sign your milk is running out, and it overlaps almost exactly with the witching hour. A baby who wants to feed, then fusses, then wants to feed again is often doing exactly this.

The timing is fairly consistent. Crying in general tends to build from about two weeks, peak around six weeks, and ease a lot by three to four months. That last number is the one to hold onto on a bad night.

What tends to help

There is no trick that works for every baby, and anything that promises one is selling something. What helps is lowering the input and giving the baby something steady to hold onto:

• Dim the room early. Lights down and voices low from about half an hour before the usual start. It will not prevent the crying, but it stops the room adding to it.
• Motion and holding. A sling or carrier, a slow walk, a gentle rhythmic sway. Many babies settle faster held upright against a chest than lying in arms.
• Steady sound. White noise, a fan, the running tap. A flat, continuous sound is closer to what they heard for nine months than a quiet room is.
• Offer the feed, but read the answer. If they latch and feed calmly, that was it. If they pull off screaming, stop trying to feed the crying away.
• A bath or a change of scene. Sometimes resetting the whole situation works better than persisting with what is not.

What does not help is working through six techniques in fifteen minutes. Pick one, give it a few minutes, and only then change.

If the crying is getting to you, it is fine to put your baby down somewhere safe, like their cot, and walk out of the room for a few minutes to breathe. A crying baby left safely for five minutes is fine. Never shake a baby, however exhausted you are.

With twins, the evening is a two-adult job

Here is where the usual advice falls short. With one baby, a parent can pace and sway for two hours. With two babies who both have a witching hour, and they often overlap, one adult is outnumbered.

So if there are two of you, split the evening by baby. One adult, one baby, each doing whatever works for theirs. This is the opposite of what works at night, where splitting by time lets one of you sleep. In the evening nobody is sleeping anyway; you need two pairs of arms.

If you are on your own for it:

• Get ahead of the start time. Feed and change both babies before the usual window opens, so the crying is not also hunger.
• Put one down safely while you settle the other. One baby crying in a safe cot for a few minutes while you settle their sibling is not neglect. It is maths.
• Swap every twenty minutes or so if both are unsettled, so neither goes too long.
• Lower the bar for the evening. Dinner can be toast. Nobody needs to be bathed tonight.

It also helps to know whose evening is actually harder. It is common for one twin to cry far more than the other, and without a record it all blurs into one long bad evening. Logging when each baby's crying starts and stops for a week usually shows that one of them has a predictable window, which makes the other one easier to plan around.

When it is not the witching hour

Evening fussiness in a baby who is otherwise feeding, weeing, pooing and growing is normal. Get advice the same day if:

• the cry sounds different from usual, or is high-pitched, weak or constant
• your baby is floppy, unusually sleepy, or not feeding
• they are being sick repeatedly, or there is blood in their poo
• they are under three months old and have a temperature of 38C or more

And trust your own sense of it. You know your babies' normal cry better than anyone, including a website. If something feels off, it is worth a call.

It ends

On the worst nights it does not feel like a phase. It is one. Most babies are markedly calmer in the evenings by three to four months, and with twins you get the small consolation that the pair usually grows out of it within a few weeks of each other.

Until then: dim the lights early, pick one thing and stick with it for a few minutes, get a second pair of arms if you can, and remember that a baby crying in your arms while you do everything right is still a baby being looked after.