There are children who cannot sleep without motion sickness. They will cry, weep, demand, and, as a rule, they will achieve their goal. Parents, who at first taught the baby to fall asleep like that, and now they themselves are not happy, turn to pediatricians with the question of how to wean the baby from the hands.
Doctor Komarovsky is no exception - a well-known pediatrician and author of numerous books and articles on the health of babies. He also receives such questions, and he tries to give the most detailed answer. Read his recommendations on how to get your baby to bed quickly.
About the problem
The newborn at first after birth is "on the same wavelength" with his mother, the cut umbilical cord only physically divided from each other, but the psychological dependence on each other remained. And to a greater extent it is expressed in the child. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that tactile contact with the mother is very important for a child who is poorly oriented in the big world he is in. In practice, it looks like this: the baby is worried - the mother takes him in her arms, the baby feels her presence, hears a voice, recognizes the native smell and calms down.
This is what mothers use, starting from the very first days of their child's independent life. He groaned in the crib - mom is already running and picks up, the baby suffers from colic - mom is right there - in her arms. Very quickly, the little one realizes that getting a mom is very easy - you just need to yell or at least sniff angrily. However, children under 2 months practically do not know how to abuse trust, and they really ask for hands because they are in dire need of it.
By 3 months everything changes. Colic has already subsided or become more rare, and there is no longer such a great need to run for every squeak of the child, but mom does it out of habit, and the baby starts to like it.
At this age, we can already talk about being spoiled, and the longer mom and dad pull with weaning, the more difficult this process will be later.
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On the one hand, motion sickness is a completely natural physiological and habitual rhythm of movements for a newborn: for all 9 months it in the mother's stomach did nothing but motion sickness. But there is absolutely no evidence that the baby needs swinging to some extent after birth. Nature did not foresee absolutely nothing for this, because the child himself cannot swing.
It means that all the arguments for motion sickness were invented by mothers, to justify your desire to lull the child to sleep as soon as possible and finally do your own business.
Komarovsky claims that there is no particular harm in motion sickness - for the child. There is no benefit either.
But for mom and dad, the harm from swinging is colossal. First of all, because a child who is accustomed to swinging in his arms before going to bed will demand this daily, constantly. And the older he gets, the more persistent and desperate he will demand his own, and then the life of the family will turn into chaos.
How to wean
If it so happened that the child has already been accustomed to the hands, all lectures to parents about how to behave with a baby from the first days after his birth lose their relevance. Such moms and dads need a recipe - what exactly needs to be done so that the child stops requiring rocking and carrying in his arms.
First of all, Evgeny Komarovsky recommends trying to calm down the parents themselves, drink valerian or motherwort, gather strength and make an irrevocable decision - not to pump anymore!
Naturally, the child will be indignant. And he will scream, and non-stop, bitterly and inconsolably. But this must be endured. Usually two or three days are enough for the baby to understand that screaming is not a way to achieve what he wants. Although the process may be delayed.
You can try to distract your child. If, after being fed, changed, put in a playpen or crib, and he began to demand that his mother take him in her arms again, give him an interesting bright toy, put (put, hang) something very interesting next to him, then there is a chance that the baby will forget for a while that he had to get into his arms at any cost. Gradually there will be more such “pauses”.
The child should be taught to do something more independently. It's wiser to put toys and leave the room, rather than sit next to him.
The faster the baby learns to do something on his own, the faster it will be possible to wean him out of hand. If the mother's departure is accompanied by a new attack of ora, you can try to retire slightly - go about your business, being in the same room, and leave the premises for only a few minutes. It is important to gradually make the absences more frequent.
The main thing is to learn at this stage that a child's cry does not threaten a bad child with anything. It is more dangerous for parents, whose eyelids begin to twitch from it and everything falls out of their hands. And the baby cannot yell indefinitely - the physiological needs for sleep will still prevail, and the baby will fall asleep. You just need to keep the Spartan calm.
Doctor Komarovsky's advice
From the very birth, you should not bring the demonstration of parental adoration to an extreme state - a newborn who does not get away with, and who is carefully passed to each other, not forgetting to rock almost constantly - this is not normal. It is normal when a child is taken in his arms to feed, change clothes, calm down if something hurts. The child should sleep in his crib, without rocking and mother's presence.
If you decide to wean your child, it is important to remember that there is no turning back. If the mother can withstand the screaming for a day, and on the second she surrenders and again takes the baby in her arms and starts swinging, then the process of weaning next time will be much more complicated, difficult and protracted. If a family has declared a fight against carrying in their arms, regardless of the age of the child (3 months old or 6 months old - does not matter), it must be decisive.
Dr. Evgeny Komarovsky will tell you how to wean a child from his hands in the next video.
