Why Babies Scream Every Evening, Like Clockwork

By Suzanne, 62 — grandmother, on the Tuesday shift
Published August 21, 2026 · 6 min read

I used to dread six o’clock.

Not traffic. Not the news. Six o’clock at my daughter’s house, where a healthy, fed, dry seven-week-old flipped into screaming like someone threw a switch.

Last Tuesday I cooked dinner in that same kitchen while the baby dozed against my shoulder. My daughter ate a hot meal at her own table. Nobody cried. Not even us.

What changed was one fact I had never heard in forty years around babies. I want to write it down while it is still fresh.

Here is how it started.

My daughter and I had a deal. Tuesday and Thursday evenings the baby was mine. She would sleep or shower or just sit in the car in the driveway with her eyes closed. I raised three babies. I figured two evenings a week was nothing.

The first Tuesday I walked in at ten to six. By quarter past, the baby was screaming so hard her little face went dark red. Fed. Changed. Warm. Screaming.

My daughter texted me from the bedroom. “She sounds like a banshee. Is she ok.”

She was ok. That was the strange part. The doctor had checked her twice. Gaining weight. Perfect. And still, every single evening, the switch flipped. Five to nine, give or take. You could set the oven timer by it.

The graveyard drawer

We tried what everyone tries. Gripe water. It made her spit up. Gas drops after every feed. Bicycle legs. Burping marathons where my arm went numb before her tummy went soft. The swing. The vacuum cleaner running in the hallway, which I felt ridiculous about, and which worked for exactly one night.

The warm bath came closest. She would go quiet in the water, little fists finally opening. Then the water cooled. Twenty minutes later we were right back at the start, except now everything was wet.

The bad night was a Thursday. I let myself in and found her sitting on the kitchen floor with the baby screaming in her arms, and she was crying too, and she looked up at me and said, “I am doing something wrong. I am her mother and I cannot fix six o’clock.”

E is for Evening

I did not sleep much that night. I sat up with my reading glasses and my phone and I went looking.

What I found is taught in children’s hospitals. It is called the Period of PURPLE Crying. It is not a disease. It is a description of normal crying in healthy babies. The crying starts rising around two weeks old. It peaks near two months. It fades by three or four. Each letter of PURPLE stands for something, and I read the list twice, because one letter explained our whole month.

E. E is for Evening. Healthy babies cluster their crying in the late afternoon and evening. It peaks then. It is not the milk. It is not something my daughter did. It is the design. Nobody had told her that. She had been searching for her mistake in the hardest hours of the day, and the hard hours were the schedule, not the mistake.

Then I found the second fact, the one that made me put the phone down.

A crying baby swallows air. Every big wail gulps some down. The nurses’ pages say it plainly: colicky babies are often gassy because they take in air while they cry.

Read that again the way I did. We spent a month treating gas to stop the crying. And much of the gas was coming from the crying.

The six o’clock loop

I started calling it the six o’clock loop. The evening crying arrives on schedule because that is how babies are built. The screaming gulps air. The air hardens that little tummy. The hard tummy gives her one more thing to scream about. Around and around, until everyone in the house is in pieces.

Once you see the loop, you see why the graveyard drawer filled up. The drops and the gripe water chase bubbles after they are already swallowed, one dose at a time. Some babies truly are helped by them. Ours was not, and now I understood why keeping up with a loop is not the same as breaking one. Burping empties what is there. The next wail refills it. The swing and the shushing calm the outside of a baby whose trouble, by evening, is on the inside.

The bath was the only thing that ever touched the actual tummy. Warmth. Grandmothers have known that part forever.

The problem was never that warmth does not help. The problem is that bath warmth quits after twenty minutes, right in the middle of a three-hour window.

Warmth that stays for the whole window

That is what led me, a few pages deeper that night, to a soft flannel belly band made for exactly this. You warm it gently, wrap it around the baby’s middle over her onesie, and it holds mild steady warmth and a light, even hold against her tummy while you carry her, walk her, rock her. It does not quit at minute twenty. It just stays, quietly doing the one thing the bath did, for the whole window, with your hands still free enough to hold a spoon.

I ordered one that night. It is called the TummyHush band.

What changed, and what did not

I will not tell you it switched the crying off. Nothing switches it off. The loop is part of how babies grow, and it fades on its own by month three or four no matter what you do. What changed for us was the middle of it. Evenings got shorter and softer. The screaming would crest and then settle against me instead of climbing. Some nights the band seemed to break the loop early. Other nights it just made her easier to hold. I want to be honest that both happened, and that the second one was worth it by itself.

The part I did not expect: my daughter started eating dinner again. Hot. At the table. She said the evenings stopped feeling like a punishment for something she could not name. That was the real purchase, if you ask me.

Two practical notes from a grandmother. There are bargain lookalikes out there. With babies, the cheap one is the one you buy twice, and it comes with no promise behind it. This one has the 30-night keep-it-either-way guarantee, and after the month we had, that mattered to me. It is $45, or three for $90, which is how I buy them now that two more grandbabies are coming this fall.

And one plain line, because I am somebody’s mother first: crying that comes with a fever, vomiting, or a baby who stops eating is not the evening loop. That is a call to the pediatrician, tonight. For everything else, warmth and a calm pair of arms are allowed to be the plan.

Six o’clock, lately

Six o’clock still comes every day at my daughter’s house. It is just an hour now. We cook. We walk the hallway. The little bear face rides along on a warm tummy, and the switch, most nights, stays unflipped.