Can a baby get dependent on swaddling?

[Angelico]

Sorry will keep this as brief as possible. DD is now 12WO. We swaddled her a lot between 3 and 6 weeks as she was colicky and flailed her arms about, waking herself. Saved us all! She then stopped needing swaddled, just slept herself but rarely for more than 5 hours (unless DH is in room with her without me, when she often manages to go 7 / 8 hours - think she can smell the buffet when I'm in with her! )

Anyway she has been a bit colicky again for the last few weeks (might have been me being on ABs have upset her tum). I've been loaded with cold so on Sunday night I gave her a few feeds and when she was still awake at 01:30 I swaddled her. She slept for NINE hours!!! Tuesday night same thing - this time slept for EIGHT HOURS.

Last night I left her unswaddled and she was back to waking after 5 or so hours for a feed, then back to sleep again. My question is: did any of you swaddle your babies till they were a bit older? And if you did were you able to stop again or did they need to be swaddled? Don't want to create a monster...

We swaddled until quite late, think it was around the 5 month mark that we stopped, and that was because she started to be able to roll. I dreaded stopping because, like you, we found she slept for massively longer stretches when swaddled, and whenever she was in a grobag her arms would flail around, took her ages to get to sleep & then would wake a lot.

In the end we bought a swaddle thing which was like a grobag with velcro arm bits, and every night we slightly loosened the velcro. I did it very gradually and in the end she got used to having no arm swaddling at all.

Good luck!

Thanks! :) Do you know what the swaddle thing you bought was?

My DD is nearly 13 weeks and we're still swaddling. Just in a muslin, and she invariably wriggles her arms out while sleeping so when I come in she's got them above her head and seems pretty happy, but she won't go to sleep with them free to flail around. I'm hoping she'll get over it by the time she can roll, as she is already getting up onto her side with no bother...

We swaddled DD until she went in to her cotbed , around 5 months.
She just couldn't sleep without it. We put her in a sleeping bag then.
I think it was her arms banging the side of the crib that used to rake her up!

Hi Angelico it was called a SwaddleMe, and we got it from Amazon.

I think we swaddled until 5 months or so - and I'll still do it maybe once or twice a week if he's struggling to nap (now 8 months). I weaned him off it by stopping using it for the first nap of the day (easiest one that he went down for), took about a week. Then I stopped using it for the late afternoon nap.

Continued to use it for his lunchtime nap for a couple of weeks, then stopped. Then bedtime. Now he sleeps in a grobag with a blanket tucked in tight around the mattress.

Forgot to add, I started off by letting him have one arm out.