Am I teaching my 9 wk old terrible sleeping habits?

[fromheretomaternity]

I am having great problems putting my 9 week old down for daytime naps - even if I spend ages getting him to sleep and put him down asleep in his moses basket, he will invariably wake up within a few minutes and I'll be back to where I started. I've tried putting him down sleepy but awake, then soothing him with rocking / shhing, but it has never worked. As for letting him cry it out - tried that once and it was horrendous - ended up with ridiculously overtired screaming baby and stressed out mother!

This morning I caved in and put him in a sling, where he is still napping now. I also take him out in the pushchair for a walk most days so that he sleeps there. But I'm worried this is getting him into bad habits and that he will never be able to sleep in the day on his own.

At night he is not too bad, he feeds then sleeps, and only wakes up once between his dream feed and around 7am.

Am I storing up horrendous problems for the future? Should I be perservering with some kind of sleep training and if so, what?

you are doing fine and not storing up trouble
tbh how they sleep in the first few months and what happens later seem pretty unconnected IME.

and I envy you those nights!

you can't spoil a baby or give them bad habits at this age, sounds like you are doing reaaly well. Just do whatever you need to do, if that is a sling/pushchair, go with it!

for goodness sake! you cant teach a 9 week old habits

please for god sake enjoy your baby and cuddle cuddle cuddle without this daft worrying about teaching them bad habits

babies are only tiny for such a short time you need to enjoy it. you will look back and be so glad you had your baby asleep in a sling close to you. its all they want - to sleep close to mummy - its not wrong at all

enjoy

Your baby sounds like mine - 9 weeks old and difficulty going down during the day. He will generally go down well for his morning nap (though not today!) but lunchtime and afternoons are more hit and miss - sometimes in his cot, sometimes not. I figured that the most important thing is to crack the nighttime bed routine because that is the one for life, whereas he'll eventually drop the lunchtime and afternoon ones. So we play hardball on evenings and make sure he goes down in his cot, and this past week he has been pretty good in the evenings, but i'm less fussy during the day.

One thing I've noticed with my baby the last few weeks, after reading a comment in Gina Ford (not doing her routine, or anyone else's, but flick through the books occasionally to see if there are any useful bits of info), is that he doesn't go longer than about 2 hours awake so when we get to about 1 1/2 hours from his last nap I start to watch more closely and when he starts to yawn or rub his eyes I take him to his cot, close the blind and put him down. This seems to have upped our chance of getting him to sleep in his cot to about 50:50 which is progress!

Good luck!

No. Don't worry about bad habits in these early days. I did, and tied myself in knots about it. You can get them into better habits later, at 6 months or whenever, if you want them to sleep in their cot in the day. Whenever you do it, you just have to be determined for a few days and be consistent. But don't worry about it when he's so little.

Whatever happens in the first months, most babies are taking one good nap in the day at home by the time they are 1-ish.

Nine weeks is early. I don't think that you need to panic yet - particularly because your baby is sleeping so well at nights.

I couldn't do controlled crying either, and my dss never went to sleep without me. It was hard, but I would have found it harder emotionally to do it any other way.

We coslept with ds1 at night until he was 3, and then he took to his own bed and has never looked back. DS2 goes down in his own bed, but comes and finds me in the night. That's fine by us. I know that, like ds1, he will settle when he is ready. In the meantime, I enjoy having a snuggle with him and we don't disturb each other.

My close friend cannot sleep in a bed with a child, and has 4 of them. She also needs a lot of sleep at night. Her priority in life is to get them to sleep without her, and she trains them, calmly but firmly, from around 10 weeks.

We are two extremes of the scale, but ime, kids respond to what you need, rather than what you would kindoflikethemtodo. If you need lots of sleep, need to go out in the evenings, need them to be independant souls at home, then you might need to look at sleep training. If you are prepared to be flexible and muddle along together, you are OK to do so. Teenagers go to sleep without parental help, however they have been raised!

oh and i agree that having a snoozing baby in sling is lovely - it's my favourite way to post on MN...

i thought controlled crying was absolutely not recommended until 6 months ??

9 or 10 weeks is really early IMO

he also cries during the day a lot and I often can't work out why... he is happy for about 20 minutes after a feed, but other than that, and other than his naps, he's generally crying, and can only be comforted by being held. other people's babies seem to amuse themselves much more easily.

it always seems as though other people have contented babies and they are coping better than you

but thats not really true

if he just wants held all the time put him in the sling and carry him around

it wont do any harm, honest

fwiw my ds has bad days and good - cries a lot or not at all - but i do think it's normal. i tell everyone he is a happy baby who just has bad days rather than the other way round iyswim as i truly believe that is what he is - i guess other mums might hear that as "i have a really content baby who rarely cries" but that's def not what i mean. if your ds is screaming that's probably more worrying, but if it is just slightly grouchy wailing then try putting him in a sling as that is brill for him and leaves your hands free for other things.

the one thing that is usually guaranteed to stop my DS crying is holding him close and singing silly songs to him - nelly the elephant is the favourite atm! i only discovered that about 10 days ago and it really helps - singing childhood songs makes me happy and smiley too!

try not to worry - sounds like you just have a normal 9 week old (or if not normal then pretty much the same as mine so we can have not normal babies together )

Sorry, didn't mean to suggest that my friend does cc from 10 weeks, but she starts to become much more routine orientated, putting baby down at certain times in darkened rooms, and allowing them to cry a while - I was always more flexible, fitting our routine around when they were tired, and too soft to let them cry. (Mind you, mine shook the walls when they cried, hers whimper gently in comparison!)

fromheretomaternity, we were worried about that, too,
and I am glad to say: it has not been a problem.

In the first 3 months just do what works,
go with the flow and forget about habits.

After the 3rd month if you find that the sleeping arrangements are not working for you or for your dd,
there are some gentle ways of slowly introducing changes.

Sleep training techniques like CC work best when they are settled into their own routine
which is more likely to be the case from 4 months onwards.

Enjoy your baby

thanks for these messages... but things are still not really working for me. DS doesn't sleep properly in the sling, he keeps stirring, and wakes up if I bend over or sit down - which means all I can do is stand or walk, which is exhausting... my back is killing me. And as he hardly slept when I was in the house, he had a long afternoon nap when I went out with his pushchair, and now he's failing to have his post-bath evening sleep - it's all gone wrong.

I need to find a way to get him to nap during the day on his own. Have there been any good threads on this or can someone offer any advice at all? My health visitor said just lie him down and stay with him, stroke him etc until asleep - even if he cries don't pick him up. Thinking of giving this a try but worried he may cry for hours.

IME it is pretty rare to find a 9wo who will happily nap in a cot of their own accord. I pushed DS in his buggy whenever he needed a sleep until he was about 5mo. As he got a bit older he could be rocked to sleep in a bouncy chair and eventually at 6/7mo he started napping in the cot.

Please don't worry about bad habits, there's no such thing at this age. Take him for a walk and, when he falls asleep, grab yourself a coffee and sit with a mag for half an hour.

If going for a walk isn't always possible, try putting him in the pram and pushing it back and forth in the hallway, or parking it in front of the washing machine -- white noise is good for soothing them.

Are you BF him? DS would often fall asleep while feeding and nap lying on me. Or you could try giving him a dummy at naptimes.

My DD used to seem to fight sleep at this age - her eyes just kept popping open. I ended up kind of rocking/jiggling her to sleep in her buggy (reclined) in our dining room, with the hairdryer set on cool and layed on the table. Once she dropped off (used to take up to 10 minutes sometimes), she would usually stay asleep for 45 mins and if I managed to catch her and rock her back to sleep before she woke fully, another 30 -45 mins. The white noise from the hairdryer meant that she didn't get disturbed by noises in the house like the telly, me making a cup of tea etc. She didn't really nap in her cot well until 4-6 months or so.

I have had various incarnations of This for all my DC's, with the added refinement of a full sized flat synthetic pillow placed in it, laid flat it forms a sort of coccon effect that seems to make them feel really secure. the same pillow goes into the moses basket with them on it and fits snugly - and before anyone leaps on me -I've run it past my midwives and HV's and they agreed that as long as it is a very flat pillow,the sort you'd chuck if it was on your bed, longer than the baby and synthetic(very important,feather would be a suffocation and overheating risk) it's okay - IME moses basket and pram mattresses are incredibly hard and uncomfortable , so it's no surprise they don't like them I've put some piccies up on my profile anyway

as you can see -DS2 and DD1 also had a lambskin on the pillow - that's before we had the new central heating lol!

my sympathies as both my 2 had/have probs sleeping as babies. I follow a routine, not too strict, and for the lunchtime and evening sleep I make sure he goes in the cot. DS1 was terrible and just like your lo would start crying the moment I laid him in the cot. However, he wouldn't sleep anywhere else apart from the car seat and only then if I was driving. I swaddled both mine which seemed to make a big difference and did so until 3 or 4 months with ds1 then moved on to a sleeping bag when he began to wriggle out of that. I can't recommend swaddling highly enough. There's one by bonfit baby that has little wings that keep their arms more secure. DS2 is still being swaddled as he's only 10 weeks.
Apart from swaddling I use white noise also, I've used a CD of waves crashing on a beach and a slumber bear, but mandymac's idea about the hairdryer is brilliant and cheap ( wish I'd thought of that one).
Sometimes it's just a question of perseverence, DS2 got to about 12/13 weeks and the sleep just seemed to sort itself out without me doing anything different. I've heard similar from other mums too, that if you can just get through these first 3 months without cracking up everything seems to settle down at the 3 month stage.
Good luck

at 9wo my dd spent most of her naps out in the pram. At 11mo she now refuses to even comntemplate a nap in her buggy and will only nap in her cot in the dark when it is quiet (she knows what she wants does my dd)- so hope that helps and lets you see that what you do now will not really affect how your ds might turn out!

i can't remember when dd decided that she'd go down to sleep by herself in her cot - but it just happened one day and it was a huge relief after weeks of rocking and patting! I think it was when it clicked that I needed to put her down around every 1.5-2 hours for a nap!

But please don't let your ds cry it out - he is too wee to understand - and like you said - very stressful for you.

He's only 9 weeks old. He has no wants that aren't also needs. And it is impossible to teach a tiny baby bad habits - he doesn't even realize he's not part of you yet, never mind ready to be "sleep trained"