The witching hour is a stretch of intense, unexplained fussiness that many newborns hit in the late afternoon and evening, usually between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. It typically starts around 2 to 3 weeks of age, peaks near 6 weeks, and fades by 3 to 4 months. It is a normal developmental phase. Call your pediatrician if crying is inconsolable or comes with fever.
This guide explains what the newborn witching hour actually is, when it starts and when it ends, and why evenings are the hardest hours of the day for a brand-new nervous system. You will see how the witching hour, colic and PURPLE crying overlap and where they genuinely differ, get an hour-by-hour plan for the stretch between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m., and find the soothing techniques most likely to help when the usual ones stop working. You will also learn how evening cluster feeding fits into the picture, how to protect your own wellbeing during the worst weeks, and the specific warning signs that mean it is time to call your pediatrician rather than wait it out.
Your baby fed well all day, napped reasonably, and seemed content. Then the sun went down and something changed. The crying starts, the usual tricks stop working, and the next five hours feel like a different baby entirely. If your evenings look like this, you are not missing something obvious — you are in the witching hour, and almost every newborn goes through some version of it.
What Is the Witching Hour in Babies?
The witching hour is an informal name for a predictable stretch of intense fussiness that many newborns experience in the late afternoon and evening. Despite the name, it rarely lasts an hour. Most families describe a window that opens somewhere around 5 p.m. and does not fully close until 10 or 11 p.m.
What makes it distinct from ordinary crying is the mismatch. Your baby is fed, dry, warm and not obviously unwell, and still cries or fusses in a way that does not respond to the things that worked earlier in the day. Feeding helps for ten minutes. Rocking helps for five. Then it starts again.
Researchers describe this as part of the normal crying curve: overall crying rises through the first weeks of life, peaks in the second month, and settles to lower levels by the fourth or fifth month. Heavy early crying has an identifiable medical cause in only a small minority of babies. The crying itself is the developmental event, not a symptom of one.
When Does the Witching Hour Start, Peak, and End?
The witching hour follows a timeline that is remarkably consistent across babies, which is the most useful thing about it: it has an end date. Fussiness typically appears around 2 to 3 weeks of age, often catching parents off guard after a deceptively calm first fortnight.
From there it intensifies week by week. The hardest stretch for most families is around 6 weeks, and the AAP notes that regular daily fussing peaks at roughly three hours a day at that point, before declining to one or two hours a day by 3 to 4 months. Babies born prematurely tend to follow their due date rather than their birth date, so the curve shifts accordingly.
Two things tend to surprise parents. The first is that week five often feels worse than week three — that is the curve doing exactly what it does, not a sign that something new has gone wrong. The second is that improvement usually arrives gradually. Evenings get shorter and less intense from around 8 to 12 weeks, so you will probably feel the change well before the pattern disappears entirely.
Why Do Babies Get Fussy in the Evening?
Evening fussiness is the visible result of several ordinary newborn systems reaching their limit at the same time each day. No single cause explains it, which is exactly why no single fix resolves it. Understanding what is stacking up, though, tells you which levers are worth pulling.
Sensory Overload
A whole day of light, faces, voices and movement accumulates in a nervous system only weeks old. By evening there is nowhere left to put it.
Overtiredness
Short or broken naps do not show up straight away. A fragmented day comes due in the evening, when an overtired baby resists sleep hardest.
Immature Regulation
Newborns cannot yet calm themselves down once they are wound up. They rely entirely on you to do the regulating for them.
Hunger Clustering
Many babies want to feed almost continuously in the evening. Shorter, closer feeds are normal newborn behaviour, not a sign of a problem.
Digestive Immaturity
A brand-new gut has spent all day working. Swallowed air and trapped wind tend to build up rather than clear as the hours pass.
The Feedback Loop
You are most depleted at exactly the hour your baby needs the most patience. Babies pick up on tension, which can extend the cycle.
Overtiredness is the one cause you have the most control over, and it starts in the morning rather than the evening. If naps are consistently short, working with age-appropriate wake windows through the day usually does more for your evenings than anything you try after 5 p.m.
Witching Hour vs. Colic vs. PURPLE Crying
These three terms describe overlapping territory rather than three separate conditions. The same baby, on the same evening, can reasonably be described using all three labels — what differs is how much crying there is and what framework the person describing it is using.
Witching hour is the informal, parent-facing name for evening fussiness. Colic is a clinical threshold, usually the "rule of threes" first described in 1954: more than three hours of crying a day, more than three days a week, for more than three weeks in an otherwise healthy, well-fed baby. PURPLE crying is an educational framework developed by developmental pediatrician Dr. Ronald G. Barr to describe normal infant crying without implying illness. Its letters stand for Peak of crying, Unexpected, Resists soothing, Pain-like face, Long-lasting, and Evening.
| Witching hour | Colic | PURPLE crying | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Informal name for evening fussiness | A clinical threshold for excessive crying | An educational framework for normal crying |
| Typical timing | 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. | Often evening, but not limited to it | Clusters in late afternoon and evening |
| How much crying | Usually under three hours | 3+ hours a day, 3+ days a week, 3+ weeks | Can reach five hours a day or more |
| Starts | 2 to 3 weeks | Second to fourth week | Around 2 weeks |
| Peaks | Around 6 weeks | Around 6 weeks | During month two |
| Resolves | 3 to 4 months | 3 to 4 months, occasionally later | 3 to 5 months |
| Response to soothing | Often helps, briefly | Difficult to soothe once started | Resists soothing by definition |
The practical takeaway is that the label does not change what you do tonight. All three describe a healthy baby crying more than feels reasonable, and all three resolve on a similar timeline. What does change your next step is whether your baby is feeding, growing and otherwise well — and that is a question for your pediatrician, not for a definition.
Your 5 PM to 11 PM Survival Plan
A survival plan for the witching hour is a sequence of small adjustments timed to the evening rather than a single technique applied on repeat. The principle is simple: start before the crying does. Most families begin reacting at 8 p.m., when the most useful window has already closed.
| Time | What is happening | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 5:00 – 6:30 p.m. | The day's sensory input has piled up | Dim the lights, mute the television, keep visitors and handling to a minimum |
| 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. | Hunger and comfort-seeking peak together | Feed on cue and expect short, frequent feeds rather than one long one |
| 8:00 – 9:30 p.m. | Overtiredness makes settling hardest | Switch to movement — a carrier walk, slow swaying, shushing at a low volume |
| 9:30 – 11:00 p.m. | Both of you are running on empty | Hand over to a partner, swap every 20 minutes, accept a later bedtime tonight |
Two practical notes. If a partner is taking the late feed with expressed milk, our guide to warming milk for night feeds covers the timing so the handover does not turn into its own delay. And if the baby will take a bottle but fights the flow, paced bottle feeding is usually the fix — an evening baby who is already overwhelmed does not cope well with a fast bottle.
For mothers who are nursing through the whole stretch, side-lying breastfeeding makes the 9 p.m. block considerably less punishing on your back and shoulders.
Soothing Techniques That Actually Work
Effective soothing during the witching hour usually means layering two or three techniques at once rather than cycling through them one at a time. A baby who is already overwhelmed rarely responds to a single input, and the ten seconds spent switching methods often undoes what the last one achieved.
Motion
Slow, continuous movement beats stillness. Walking with your baby in a carrier or a rocking chair both work; the key is that it does not stop.
Sound
Shushing, a fan or white noise gives the nervous system one steady input instead of many. Keep the volume low and the source away from the bassinet.
Swaddle
Containing the arms stops the startle reflex from restarting the crying. Stop swaddling at the first signs of rolling, usually around 2 to 4 months.
Sucking
Sucking is regulating in itself, whether at the breast or on a pacifier once breastfeeding is well established.
Dark and Dull
A dim room with nothing to look at is not boring for a newborn — it is a relief. Stepping outside into cool evening air often works just as well.
Swap Out
A fresh pair of arms changes the dynamic for both of you. Handing over is a technique in its own right, not an admission of defeat.
Babywearing is worth singling out because Mayo Clinic lists a walk in a baby carrier among the approaches that settle a crying infant, and it is the only one that leaves your hands free. If you are choosing one, our guide to picking the right baby carrier covers newborn positioning: high on the chest, face visible and turned to one side, chin off the chest.
During the day, short and frequent supervised tummy time sessions help with the trapped wind that builds up by evening — though a baby already in the middle of the witching hour is not the right audience for it.
Cluster Feeding and the Witching Hour
Cluster feeding is a pattern in which a baby feeds very frequently over a few hours, often every 30 to 60 minutes, and it lands squarely in the same evening window as the witching hour. The two travel together so often that most parents experience them as one event, but they are different things: one is a feeding pattern, the other is general fussiness.
The distinction matters because it changes what you expect. A cluster-feeding baby who settles between feeds is doing something completely normal — see our cluster feeding guide for how long each phase usually lasts. A baby who takes the breast every half hour and still seems unsettled afterwards is showing you both patterns at once, and feeding alone will not resolve the second one.
Frequent evening feeds can also make supply feel inadequate when it is not. Feeds are shorter and closer together at this hour for most nursing mothers, which is a normal rhythm rather than a shortfall. If evening feeding is uncomfortable rather than just relentless, the cause is usually positioning — our positioning and latch guide is the place to start. A long evening of short, frequent feeds can leave nipples tender, and some mothers use silver nursing cups between feeds for comfort during those weeks.
If you are trying to work out whether the evening pattern is feeding-driven at all, tracking a few days against a newborn feeding schedule usually answers the question faster than guessing does.
When the Witching Hour Wears You Down
The witching hour is a parental endurance event as much as an infant developmental one, and the research reflects that. The AAP's technical report on abusive head trauma notes that the normal crying curve is paralleled by the incidence of abusive head trauma in infancy, with the peak of the crying curve at 5 to 6 weeks and the peak in hospitalisations following roughly four weeks later.
That is not written to frighten you. It is written because it establishes something important: the feeling of being pushed past your limit by a crying baby is common enough to be measurable, and the response to it has a clear protocol.
Put your baby on their back in an empty bassinet or crib — no blankets, pillows, bumpers or toys — close the door, and take ten to fifteen minutes in another room. Breathe, call someone, step outside. Your baby is safe crying in a safe place for a few minutes. No one should ever shake a baby, for any reason.
Beyond the acute moment, the weeks around the peak are worth planning for deliberately. Arrange for someone else to take the 8 p.m. block twice a week if you can. Eat dinner at 4 p.m. rather than trying to at 8. The rest of the postpartum picture is also still in motion — the practical side of those early weeks is covered in our postpartum recovery guide, and if broken evenings are compounding broken nights, postpartum night sweats may be part of why your own sleep is not restoring you. A realistic postpartum essentials list helps more at this stage than it did before the birth.
If low mood, anxiety or a sense of disconnection is persisting rather than passing, that is worth raising with your provider on its own terms — separately from anything your baby is doing in the evenings.
When to Call Your Pediatrician
The witching hour is a diagnosis of pattern, not of exclusion, which means it only applies to a baby who is otherwise well. Certain signs move a crying evening out of "normal phase" territory and into "call now", and they are worth knowing in advance so you are not weighing them up at 10 p.m.
Contact your pediatrician promptly for a fever in a baby under 12 weeks old, crying that continues without pause for more than two hours, vomiting or a refusal to feed, noticeably fewer wet nappies, or a baby who seems limp, floppy or unusually difficult to wake. A cry that sounds different from your baby's usual cry — higher, weaker or more shrill — is also worth a call.
Consult your pediatrician if crying is persistent, inconsolable, or accompanied by fever. You do not need to meet a threshold to ask. Persistent inconsolable crying is one of the most common reasons parents contact a pediatrician in the first months, and ruling out a physical cause is a normal, expected part of the process.
🎯 Key Takeaways
- ✓ The witching hour is a normal developmental phase, not a sign that something is wrong with your baby or with your parenting.
- ✓ It usually begins at 2 to 3 weeks, peaks around 6 weeks, and resolves by 3 to 4 months.
- ✓ Witching hour, colic and PURPLE crying describe overlapping territory — they differ in how much crying there is and how it is framed, not in being three separate conditions.
- ✓ Evening fussiness is driven by accumulated sensory input, an immature nervous system, and a day's worth of missed sleep coming due at once.
- ✓ Layering motion, sound, containment and sucking works better than cycling through techniques one at a time — and nothing works every evening.
- ✓ When your own frustration rises, put your baby on their back in an empty bassinet, step out for ten minutes, and never shake a baby.
Frequently Asked Questions
What time is the witching hour for newborns?
For most babies it falls between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m., with the hardest stretch usually in the two hours before you hoped they would settle for the night. Some babies run earlier, some later, and a small number have their difficult stretch in the early morning instead.
When does the newborn witching hour end?
Most babies are through it by 3 to 4 months. The evenings usually start getting shorter and more manageable from around 8 to 12 weeks, well before the pattern disappears completely, so you are likely to feel improvement before it ends.
Is the witching hour the same as colic?
They overlap but they are not identical. Witching hour is an informal name for evening fussiness. Colic is a clinical threshold: more than three hours of crying a day, more than three days a week, for more than three weeks in an otherwise healthy baby.
Is the witching hour normal, or is something wrong with my baby?
It is a normal developmental phase. Crying rises through the first weeks of life, peaks in the second month, and falls away by the fourth or fifth in healthy babies. A medical cause is found in only a small minority of cases of heavy early crying.
Am I doing something wrong if nothing I try works?
No. One of the defining features of this phase is that it resists soothing. Techniques that reliably calm your baby at 10 a.m. can fail completely at 8 p.m. That is the nature of the phase, not a measure of how well you are reading your baby.
Does the witching hour mean my milk supply is low?
Usually not. Evening feeds tend to be shorter and closer together, which can feel like the supply has run out, but frequent evening nursing is normal newborn behaviour. Steady weight gain and enough wet nappies are the signals that matter.
How do I avoid the witching hour?
You usually cannot prevent it, but you can soften it. Protecting daytime naps, dimming the house before the difficult stretch begins, and starting the calm routine at 5 p.m. rather than at 8 p.m. tend to make the evening shorter and less intense.
Should I let my baby cry during the witching hour?
Holding a crying newborn is never the wrong choice, and you cannot spoil a baby this young. But if you feel your own frustration rising, putting your baby on their back in an empty bassinet and stepping out for ten minutes is the safe option.
Can cluster feeding make the witching hour worse?
They usually happen together rather than one causing the other. Cluster feeding is a feeding pattern; the witching hour is general fussiness. A baby who takes the breast every 30 minutes all evening and still seems unsettled is showing you both at once.