So tell me about your 'wind down' routine for babies who struggle to sleep, please.

[AngelDog]

DS is nearly 6 weeks. He really struggles to get to sleep. At the moment, I watch for the signs of tiredness (yawning, grumpiness) and immediately swaddle him. I then hold him against me upright and pat his back and shush loudly in his ear. Eventually he gets drowsy and will drop off, at which point I can put him in his carry cot. If he is particularly tired, this will be a fairly painless process. However on other occasions he 'fights' back, kicking, writhing and crying and it can take ages.

I wonder whether I should be giving him a more gentle transition from awake time to swaddled-back-patting-and-shushing time? Maybe some sort of wind-down time is what he needs, but I don't really have any ideas as to what to do with him.

I'd be interested to know what other people do to encourage their babies to get to the drowsy stage.

Thanks!

Hi AngelDog - is this for bedtime sleep or naptime? My DS (now 7 weeks) struggles to get to sleep, and then to stay asleep, at naptime, but (fingers crossed and touching wood) we seem to have cracked bedtime.

I don't know whether it's because of the routine I have had in place since he was about 2 weeks old, but it might be worth a try (I do not deviate from it just in case - so this does mean I bath him every day!)

I feed between 6.30 & 7pm (EBF), he usually nods off, but rather than put him straight to bed then I give him a bath (he loves them though), (if he has nodded off while feeding he is awake again by the time I am undressing him), after his bath I rub some body lotion in, dress him and carry him to the bedroom. I do not have a light on in the bedroom, just the hall light which gives me just enough to see by to swaddle him. I talk to him in a gentle voice after his bath, about him being all clean and ready for bed etc etc.

Sometimes he does cry, either at the swaddling stage, or at the holding upright against my body stage, as though he knows that bedtime is coming and objects! I too hold him upright to me after swaddling -sometimes if he cries I have taken to trying different positions - sometimes just cradled in my arms. I don't pat, as this seems too much for him, but I sing a lullaby, or shh next to his ear as you do, and rock back and forth as I sit on the bed.

If he crying then I try to keep going until he is quiet before I put him into his basket. Sometimes though I feel that the shhing and rocking are making him cry more though, so a couple of times I have put him down in his basket when he is crying a bit (not screaming) and he stops!

I'd say 4 or 5 nights out of 7 he stays quiet when I put him in the basket, and gets himself off to sleep. Sometimes he does cry for a few minutes and then gets to sleep. Occasionally he will scream, and not settle, and then I find a dummy does help him fall to sleep.

Hope this gives you some ideas. Good luck

Are you talking about naps or night time?

My DS1 was like this (hard to settle - fights sleep) and DS3 (12 weeks) also (DS2 was a dream baby and just went to sleep!). For naps I take him (DS3) to his cot when he's rubbing his eyes and showing signs of tiredness, swaddle him, sit him on my knee and read him a story (I think I benefit more than him!), sing 'ba ba black sheep', cuddle him and put him down and put his musical mobile on. He will cry! I give him a minute or so, return to him, shussh him, and repeat a few times. Usually if he doesn't settle then I give him his dummy which will settle him straight away. At night time we give him a bath, bottle, and bed and he settles quite well now with about 10 seconds tired crying / moaning. He does wake in the night though and can be hard to settle again but he has eczema and we think his skin is itching him at night so we are just having to persevere with shusshing and patting at 4am onwards.

Thank you both - I'm interested to know about both naps and nighttime as poor DS finds it equally difficult to sleep at either time. He's still on a bit of a 24 hour day so that although we don't do play time at night, and I try to keep the lights low and not talk to him, he doesn't sleep for any longer stretches at night than he does during the day. (And, annoyingly, he tends to stay awake for the same length of time at night as he does during the day. But since we don't do play time at night, that means it just takes longer to get him to sleep!)

Fortunately once he's asleep, he tends to stay asleep - except when he's been over-tired, when he will wake up again after an hour or less and cry because he's so tired.

Thanks for the explanations of what you do; any more gratefully received!

ds is 11 weeks now. routine is same as was at 6 weeks.

he has a bf and then nap at 4pm for about 45mins. i then keep him awake until dd goes up to get ready for bed with dh at 6.30pm.

i then get all ds's bedtime things and sort him out downstairs. so he has a top and tail wash (bath is only once a week with dd), nappy change, olive oil massage all over, soft brush his scalp for cradle cap, into vest and sleepsuit, zipped into grobag.

7pm i get laptop ready on sofa arm (load up mn ) and get ds laid on his feeding cushion. he then feeds for as long as he likes, usually half an hour. then he unlatches and falls asleep. i move him over to his basket where he stays through the evening until we all go up to bed in our room (dh carries him, too heavy in the basket for me!). he's getting too big for basket now so all this will be done in his bedroom from probably next month.

he then sleeps until 6.30am, has a feed of about 10mins. nods off again. back in the basket until dd comes to wake us up at 7.30am.

daytime- he naps in car/sling/after a feed. no set routine at all.

I had this with my DS. If I missed the sleep window even by minutes, he went mental. Once it got to the eye rubbing, yawning phase it was too late.

I generally found parenting books demoralising, but did find that the Baby Whisperer "routines" helped to make sure I wasn't missing the sleep window. I can't remember the timing for babies that age, but if they can't stay awake for more than 1 hr, or whatever it is, I would make sure to have him swaddled or tucked up in the pram before that so he had time to wind down and fall asleep.

Have a look at the Baby Whisperer if you haven't already and you can see if the timings might suit your baby. They aren't routines, as such, but just general timings of how long babies of a certain age can stay awake before needing a sleep.

For the first couple of months I really bought into the "they sleep when the need to", but in my DS's case it wasn't true. I needed to keep to more of a routine and make sure I was keeping an eye on his sleep timings.

Thanks for the suggestions. MomOrMum, you're right about the sleep window. I managed to completely miss it earlier (ggrr). And then his nappy leaked less thanan hour after he'd finally gone to sleep (ggrr again).

I'm following the Baby Whisperer's 'EASY' sequence, although I've not yet read the book - hopefully I'll be able to get a copy in the next week.

DS won't take any adjustment at all to get him into a routine - even if we go out in the car, it throws him off his normal pattern and it all becomes a bit unpleasant. On the positive side, as long as I let him wake whenever he wants, he's quite happy - as long as I spot that sleep window in time, that is!

My DS is 8 weeks tomorrow and I can completely empathise AngelD, see my thread from 2 weeks ago here. I wanted to post to say how much things have improved since then. Obviously it might not be the same for you but I really hope so!

Things I tried included moving him from his moses basket to the cot (he is quite long and I found he was waking himself by brushing his head against the top of the basket); I went to a cranial osteopath (forceps delivery) - he didn't think there was much wrong with his head and I didn't think much of what went on in the session, but there have certainly been improvements since then, can't say how much down to CO.

I totally agree with MomOrMum, I think things really improved when I took control of his sleeping more and basically looked at the clock when he woke up and pretty much bang on 2 hours later tried to get him to sleep, whether he looked tired or not. This doesn't always work, but I think it has had a big impact.

Like Emalina we have a bath and bed routine (except ours has a double dose of bf-ing because he is a pretty greedy boy!). He almost always goes for 4 hours after this so something must work in it. I've been bringing it forward recently and this has worked well for increasing his hours asleep a day.

I am a book person and I have been reading everything I can on sleep - I've tried the Pantley No Cry books, the Sound Sleep book, and the Marc Weissbluth book teaandcake kindly recommended in the other thread. Most of them still say that you can't influence a newborn sleep pattern; it seems odd to me that none of these books talk about this issue but looking at past threads suggests it's not that uncommon. One good thing I from the Weissbluth book was that the "fussiness" peaks at 6 weeks - I held onto that and it was true in our case.

Oh, another thing I tried was not making eye contact when shushing to sleep - sometimes that seems a bit cruel so then I shut my eyes or blink slowly, hoping he will imitate me! And have you tried putting him down before he drops off and leaving him to settle himself - my DS is quite good at going off by himself if we do this.

HTH...