Rock-a-bye baby

Your brand new bundle of joy has just spent the last nine months enjoying a gentle rocking and swaying motion in your womb. Now that they are out in the big wide world, all you instinctively want to do is protect and keep them close. As you naturally feed or nurse your newborn baby, rock them, and hold them in your arms, they feel safe and comforted. These moments of closeness not only help to cement a bond between mother and baby, but they also help to soothe a baby to sleep. The rocking motion has been proven to help newborn babies drift off to sleep swiftly

 

However, in the blink of an eye, months have passed by and you feel like you are lifting weights all day and night, with arms so sore that you wish that you had actually worked out! Your brand-new baby has gotten older and heavier and is taking forever to fall asleep in your arms now. ‘Why won’t they fall asleep quickly like they used to in my arms?’ and ‘Why do they keep waking up so soon after I put them down?’ are some of the questions running through your mind. For some of you, your little ones may be feeding throughout the night at the same frequency as when they were newborns. You just know they are not hungry and it is not sustainable for you to be feeding them to sleep any longer.

 

Parents often find themselves continuing to use methods such as rocking, swaying, patting, and feeding to support their babies to sleep as they get older too. Babies and young children can often become accustomed to this support to fall asleep. If we take rocking your little one to sleep, for example, this can become a firm habit as your child learns that they need this movement to fall asleep. Children and adults wake momentarily during the night when transitioning between sleep cycles. Hence, children who have been supported to sleep in some way often need this support to be reinstated every time they wake up during the night or even during their naps. It can begin to disrupt their sleep as well as yours.

 

If you feel that these methods are no longer sustainable for you, it is possible to encourage your little one to settle themselves to sleep, and the beauty of this is that once they learn to do so, they can settle themselves back to sleep after each sleep cycle too. By teaching your child how to self-settle, rest and sleep can be restored for the whole family!