[This is a l-o-n-g post because I have included excerpts from a fabulous book, so please bear with me.]
While you were pregnant your baby would have been rocked with every movement you made. Rocking is very soothing, and the rhythmic motion enables the body's nervous system to relax.
President Kennedy had a rocking chair which he used every day to ease his pain. Do you have a rocking chair? Sitting in it with baby, and rocking, calms you both down. One with wide spaced arms so you can hold baby comfortably for feeding.
When my daughter was a baby, I had a carpenter make a sturdy pine rocking bed for her - it was beautifully crafted. He took as its inspiration, traditional Bavarian/Swiss/Swedish rocking cradles, but I wanted it to last for a few years so it was bigger. Basically, it was a junior-size box/bed on rockers. He cut heart shaped holes in the sides and ends for extra ventilation, although the sides weren't high. If she stirred at all in the night, the movement made it rock gently and it lulled her back to sleep. I had it next to my bed and could lean over and rock it to get her to sleep. I was breastfeeding, so she was also in my bed.
Similar in a way to this photo, but the sides were much lower. He put the supporting base strut/battens half way up the height so the mattress rose higher - he was anxious that she had lots of air to breathe. She finally outgrew it at about 5 years old. She is petite.
Some guidelines from La Leche League on sleep:
https://www.laleche.org.uk/supporting-families-sleep/
VERY IMPORTANT! Please buy yourself a copy of this book:
Touching the human significance of the skin by Ashley Montagu. It saved my sanity in the first two years.
Also, another worthwhile treasure is The continuum concept by Jean Liedloff - great insights into harmonious methods of child rearing and care.
Excerpt from Touching:
When the baby feels uncomfortable or insecure it may whimper, and if its mother or anyone else rocks the cradle this will have a soothing effect. Rocking reassures the baby, for in its mother's womb it was naturally rocked by the normal motions of her body. To be comfortable means to be comforted, and for the infant this comfort is largely derived from the signals it receives from its skin. The greatest of all comforts is to be cradled in the mother's arms or lap or supported on her back. There is, as Peiper has remarked, "no better sedative."
Ashe says, "It is necessary to rock a healthy young infant in his cradle or in the arms or baby carriage only once when he is on the verge of crying: He immediately quiets down and starts to cry again as soon as the movement stops momentarily. He will surely not cry if it is done right."
It is absurd to suggest that the cradle is harmful because the infant will develop the habit of having to be rocked before it will be able to fall asleep. If cradle rocking is habit-forming, so is breastfeeding or bottle feeding. Yet children are weaned from breast or bottle, unless it is done too suddenly, without any serious difficulty or after effects. Millions of babies who had been rocked to sleep in cradles grew up to be adults who were able to fall asleep without needing to be rocked. Children outgrow the cradle as well as they do their baby clothes.
Rocking chairs are still popular among older folks, especially in unsophisticated rural areas, where "modernity" has not made such complete inroads as it has in the more worldly-wise urban areas. It is strange that no one has ever suggested that the rocking chair is "unnecessary and vicious' in adults, or that adults will be unable to relax unless they can do so with the assistance of a rocking chair.
Rocking chairs, in fact, for adults, and especially the aging, are to be highly recommended for reasons similar to those which make the cradle so highly recommendable for babies.
Rocking, in both babies and adults, increases cardiac output and is helpful to the circulation; it promotes respiration and discourages lung congestion; it stimulates muscle tone; and not least important, it maintains the feeling of relatedness.
A baby, especially, that is rocked, knows that it is not alone. A general cellular and visceral stimulation results from the rocking.
Again, especially in babies, the rocking motion helps to develop the efficient functioning of the baby's gastrointestinal tract. The intestine is loosely attached by folds of peritoneum to the back wall of the abdominal cavity. The rocking assists the movements of the intestine like a pendulum and thus serves to improve its tone.
The intestine always contains liquid chyle and gas. The rocking movement causes the chyle to move backward and forward over the intestinal mucosa. The general distribution of chyle over the whole of the intestine undoubtedly aids digestion and probably absorption.
Writing in 1934, Zahovsky stated that "young infants who are rocked after nursing as a rule have less colic, less enterospasm [intestinal spasm] and become happier babies than those who are laid in the crib without rocking. In fact, I have several times availed myself of this physical therapy even in recent years to relieve the dyspeptic young baby. ... I firmly believe that the cradle assists maternal nursing."
Dr. Zahovsky concludes with the words, "Someday, I believe, it will be no disgrace to rear the young baby in a cradle and even sing him to sleep by a lullaby."
More than a generation has had to elapse before anyone could be found to echo Dr. Zahovsky's words. The cradle should be restored to the infant. It should never have been discarded in the first place. The reasons that were given for its banishment were completely unsound and wholly unjustified, based as they were on misconceptions concerning the nature and needs of the child and the ludicrous notion that cradle rocking is detrimental to the child.
The benefits of rocking are considerable. When the infant is too warm the rocking has a cooling effect, hastening evaporation from the skin. When the infant is too cold the rocking helps to warm him. The warming has a hypnotic effect on the infant, and it is soothing to his nervous system. Above all, the rocking motion produces a gentle stimulation of almost every area of his skin, with consequential beneficial physiological effects of every kind.
As a first step in the ultimately possible, and much to be desired restoration of the cradle to its rightful place,* rocking chairs have been introduced into some hospitals. For example, at Riverside Hospital, Toledo, Ohio, rocking chairs have been in use as a regular part of the infant-care program. In 1957 a mahogany rocking chair was introduced as a Christmas gift from Riverside nurse aides, who pooled money to buy what they voted as "most needed new equipment" at the hospital. In each of the three nurseries a rocking chair is available, including one for premature infants.
Mrs. Herbert Mercurio, obstetrical supervisor, states that the old rocking chairs are always used by nurses and aides at infant feeding time. "It's the best way to feed a baby and put him to sleep at the same time. It's relaxing for the nurse, too." The rocking chairs are used to pacify crying babies. Mrs. Mercurio feels strongly that rocking chairs are useful and practical and encourages their use at home. "A rocking chair," she remarked, "won't spoil a child. This is something they enjoy, but outgrow rapidly."
Quite possibly the rocking chair used in this manner has some advantages over the cradle. I think both might well be come standard equipment in the home with a small infant in this manner at once satisfying the need for rocking of both infant and adult.
Studies on the effects of rocking on human infants indicate their considerable benefits. Neal studied the effects of rocking on two-to-three-month prematures. These were rocked for the number of days they were premature, and it was found that the rocked prematures were significantly superior to the non rocked prematures in the development of tracking behavior to visual and auditory stimulation, head lifting, crawling, muscle tone, strength of grasping, and weight gain. In addition no edema ever developed in the rocked prematures, whereas it did in some of the non rocked ones.
Ms. Neal suggests that rocking stimulation provided by the mother during pregnancy constitutes an important sensory input for normal development, and that prematures are unduly handicapped, following deprivation stimulation, by their premature birth.
Woodcock observed the effects of rocking new-born female babies in a mechanical bassinet for one hour a day for six days. On the sixth day they were tested for heart-rate response to a buzzer as a measure of reactivity. It was found that the rocked babies had significantly fewer responses and took a shorter time to finish their acceleration response than the un-rocked newborns. The decreased heart-rate and acceleration responses in the rocked infants suggest an increased maturational development.
A fascinating account of the serendipitous discovery of the benefits of rocking for seriously disturbed mental patients is reported by Dr. Joseph C. Solomon. Dr. Solomon observed that patients taken from their rooms in hospital for transfer to an other town by train, though they had earlier needed to be restrained in straitjackets and muffs, became very quiet and calm as soon as the train was in motion.
Solomon reasoned that, since in the womb the child is subjected to considerable passive motion, part of the human contact these patients may have missed as children was the active rocking in the mother's arms which would, among other things, stimulate the vestibular apparatus.
Purposive active motions, Solomon suggests, develop with facility and pleasure when the passive motion imparted by the mother has been satisfactorily internalized as an integrated inner function. Conversely, when there is little chance for the internalization of the passive movements derived from the mother, the active rocking becomes a habitual device for self-containment.
It is a method of defending the formative ego against the feeling of being abandoned. This follows the principle of Newton's Second Law. If you actively push against something, it is as though something is pushing against you. In this way the infant accomplishes the goal of not feeling completely alone. It is as though somebody is always there. As such it is
another self-containment device similar to thumb sucking, the security-blanket, nail-biting, or masturbation."
_
Last thoughts
- Are you breastfeeding / bottle feeding? Have you started introducing other foods? Which? Could any of these be causing problems?
- Are you using any cleaning/laundry products with chemicals that she may be sensitive to?
- Are you using a tie-on baby carrier (not one with metal frames/bars), so she gets passive body-to-body contact? https://kellymom.com/parenting/parenting-faq/sling/