Standing Up

[Zoe1985]

Hi All,

My son is nearly 5 months old and will only fall asleep if myself or partner are standing up with him. Once he asleep it then takes at least half an hour to put him down on his own. We have no issues once he is asleep but wondering if anyone else has to go through this or if anyone has and managed to fix it.

Thanks xx

Moving (ie putting down) a sleeping baby is never a good idea for developing good sleep habits.

Ideally you want to help baby to learn to go to sleep where he will stay asleep. During the day the easiest way to do that is napping in something that moves (bouncy chair is my favourite, but pram also works). A dummy helps for independant sleep too.

At night, if you breastfeed, you could try feeding baby lying down.

Otherwise, it's a case of slowly weaning off being held to go to sleep, by gradually putting baby down in a less-deep sleep.

I'm going to disagree with the previous poster. Doing this will not ruin your baby's sleep habits/ lead to him forming bad sleep associations. All that guff is just that in my view. Kids grow out if things & he will move on from this one day even if you just carry on with it. However, I can see if must be a total pain in the arse & exhausting! Even if you have to lie with him at least you'd be lying down, so I'd do that, lie next to him & see if that helps. Will make the transfer much easier too.

Thanks breadwidow. Will give laying down with him a go. Hopefully, he'll grow out of it soon. Just gets more awkward the bigger he gets!