7 week old won’t nap in the day

[Billie1992]

I’m hoping for advice or just reassurance that I’m not the only one experiencing this.

My son is 7 weeks old and at night he’s a brilliant sleeper. He’ll go down to sleep at 8:30pm/9pm ish and then sleep until 6:30am/7am. He wakes every 2-3 hours for feeds and a nappy change but he’s straight back to sleep after, just a bit of patting on his back. Hes started sleeping in his next to me crib through the night as well which is great.

The days however are exhausting. His average daytime sleep between 8am - 8pm is 2 hours. Some days I only get 50 minutes and in order to get him to sleep I have to bounce him for 20-30 minutes or walk him in his pram (he wakes up as soon as the pram stops moving). The rest of the day he’s either feeding or crying. By 5pm I feel broken and I feel like I’m just persevering with the day so that we can go to bed. I’ve talked to so many midwives, health visitors and the GP about it but I’m told some babies just don’t sleep during the day.

I don’t feel like I can go anywhere because I either have to spend the entire time feeding him or he starts crying.

has anyone else experienced this? Of my 16 mum friends, no one else has this problem!

Have you tried swaddling? We have a 6 week old and the only thing that helps with daytime naps seems to be swaddling

Oh gosh, this sounds just like my DS! He’s 4 months now and the daytime naps have become easier.

I think all babies are different and you have to be patient with yourself and your DS while you work out between you what works. It will take a long time to rock him to sleep at first, but with perseverance I found that the time it takes does reduce gradually. Things to try that work for us are:

• watching for sleepy signs like a hawk and intervene before DS gets overtired. Also, keep an eye on the clock and his wake windows and try hard not to go beyond those (I tend to find that he’s awake longer between naps in the afternoon than the morning)
• a little mini routine before you start helping DS nap, could simply be changing his nappy and giving him a big cuddle. My DS loves Disney piano on Alexa too!
• find a combination of rocking and singing that works for you. I watch DS’s eyes as I rock him, and whatever movement is helping them fall shut I repeat. DS loves singing, so I sing peaceful songs.
• rock him in a space that isn’t too stimulating and possibly a bit darker, like a hallway
• embrace contact naps, if they work

Good luck! I’m sure you’re doing a great job and all this is perfectly normal

YES!!
this was my baby exactly.

He slept fine for day naps until he was four weeks old, then the growth spurts started from 5 weeks which meant sleep regression in the day time (also slept well at night like yours) and lots of fussing and crying unless he was on my boob..

He cried in a baby sling, he cried in the pram, he couldnt be rocked to sleep for days.. setting him up for naps or checking wake times etc was all irrelevant. So i just stopped exhausting myself and stopped trying to put him to sleep until eventually he fell into the rythm again himself. All he wanted was to be on me and was inconsolable otherwise. It was challenging but my midwife encouraged me to just get to a point of acceptance and take each day as it comes.

Late afternoons and evenings were especially hard as he cluster fed and screamed a lot.

Then eventually he started napping more around 8 weeks but would only sleep on me so the sling became my best friend and he slept all of his day naps in there.
Now he is almost 4months and i can put him down most of the time unless he is having an off day, then i put him in a carrier/sling.

In the moment it feels like the worst and like its forever, but take heart, this too shall pass! He is healthy, growing and developing! Youre doing a great job!

Follow the same routine every time. The Eat.Activity.Sleep.You (E.A.S.Y.) pattern works well:

Awake,
feed,
burp,
a bit of walking about or kick time,
nappy change,
watch for a yawn or eye rub,
straight to a dark room,
swaddle, lie down in cot/basket.

Feeding immediately after waking gives pattern to the routine and avoids feeding to sleep (which can become a pain, believe me!).

You can give a dummy if they are rooting for food after they've shown sleepy signs (yawn, eye rubs, avoiding eye contact) and they've already been fed. Again this avoids feeding to sleep. They learn that dark room, swaddle, dummy means sleep pretty quickly.

PS. What i also meant to say - it was ridiculously hard!!! Especially the days when he had cramps throughout the night and we didnt sleep. I just remember handing him to DH, crying, saying I can’t physically do this anymore. Aside from the fact that being fed was the only thing that consoled him, I would need to walk and bounce him so that he would keep suckling. It was exhausting.I couldnt give him to anyone else and couldn’t leave the house for days. On the plus side i lost all my pregnancy weight during this time 🤣
A friend also recommended the EASY routine method, it made me feel very insecure because any sense of routine totally went out the window until he was 12 weeks and thats TOTALLY okay! Dont beat yourself up about him not sleeping, try to go with the flow, he will sleep again!

Sweetestp thank you so much! I feel like I’ve tried everything - swaddling, dark room, bouncing, dummy, watching for cues - to get a routine going and it makes me feel like such a failure that it doesn’t work.
He’ll be 8 weeks next week so fingers crossed things start to get a little easier!

Yeah maybe they will but it helped me to not create too much expectations, i just remember one day he was crying so much and i decided to swaddle and rock him and voila he was asleep! There wasn't anything in particular i did differently, he just reached a different stage himself. Since then he has gone through sleep regressions again, they are always accompanied by more drinking throughout the day too so now im better prepared and the crying definitely gets less!all this routine enforcement doesn’t necessarily make room for being responsive and just getting to know baba for who he is. ♥️ Also dont feel bad if you're feeding him to sleep at night, its natural and beneficial to you both. Mine doesn't take a dummy at all! Be kind to yourself, you’re not doing anything wrong!

Try settling him for a nap way before when you think you need to. Their wake windows are tiny at this age - if he's yawning or rubbing his face he's overtired. (As he gets older they work as nap cues, but when tiny they're very late cues.)

Will he contact nap? For the first three months mine didn't really sleep except on me in the day, or (thankfully) in the pram IF I kept moving. A sling and keep walking might also work.

Have you tried white noise?

Otherwise I'm really sorry, it's shit. Babies are shit. But rest assured he WILL sleep at some point as he gets older. It doesn't feel like it when you're deep in the trenches, but everything is a phase. Try getting a parent/MIL/trusted friend to take him for a couple of hours while you sleep or just get on with something else with earphones in so you get a rest. I remember taking a day off work to help my friend with her 10-ish week old who wouldn't sleep - I literally just sat upstairs with him for hours while she enjoyed being baby-free.