Babycalming: Simple Solutions for a Happy Baby

CAROLINE DEACON
Babycalming

Simple Solutions for a Happy Baby

Copyright

Thorsons

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Thorsons is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

First published in collaboration

with National Childbirth Trust Publishing 2004

© NCT Publishing 2004

Caroline Deacon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Extracts from Dream Babies by Christina Hardyment (Jonathan Cape, 1983,) are published with kind permission of the author © 1983 by Christina Hardyment

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007159024

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780007380022

Version: 2016-06-29

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction: Why the Three-step Plan Works

Your Baby from Birth to Toddlerhood

1 Why Do Babies Cry?

2 Getting Used to the World: The First Six Weeks

3 Learning about Routines: Six Weeks to Six Months

4 Getting Sociable: Six Months to Two Years

5 The Need for Boundaries: You and Your Toddler

PUTTING THE THREE-STEP PLAN TO WORK

Step One: Feeding

6 Feeding Your Newborn

7 How Much and How Often?

8 Night-feeding

9 Your Baby’s Need to Suckle

Step Two: Comfort

10 Recreating the Womb

11 Using Sound and Movement

12 The Power of Touch

13 Comforting the Baby Who Has Colic

14 Feeding the Baby with Colic

15 Is Your Colicky Baby Oversensitive?

16 Treatments for Colic

Step Three: Sleeping

17 How Sleep Works for You

18 How Sleep Works for Your Baby

19 Can You Train Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night?

20 Helping Your Baby Fall Asleep

21 Helping Your Baby Stay Asleep

22 All Change: Sleep and the Older Baby

23 Who Sleeps Where?

24 Sleeping Safely

25 Putting it All Together: What’s Going to Work for You?

Appendix: Cows’ Milk-free Diet for Breastfeeding Mothers

References

Useful Organizations and Further Reading

Further Reading

All about the National Childbirth Trust

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Introduction – Why the Three-step Plan Works

After all the anticipation during pregnancy, when your baby finally arrives, no matter how organized you are, life will feel pretty chaotic amidst the excitement and wonder. New parents in particular are thrown straight in at the deep-end – after all, your baby doesn’t come with a handy manual – and the sense of responsibility can be overwhelming.

What You Need

Like most people, you are probably used to running your life with one eye on the clock and the other on the task in hand: you have a routine and normally expect to do certain things in a certain order throughout the day. Because of this, it is natural to hope that your baby will fall into a routine that will complement yours and enable you to plan and manage your day-to-day life.

At the same time, you also hope that your baby will be happy, feed easily and sleep well. If he cries, you would like what he needs to be obvious, so that you can know how to respond. However, many babies do not appear to behave like this: they cry seemingly without reason, they sleep in fits and starts or they want to feed all the time. They don’t seem to have an internal clock and they show no interest in the clock on the wall!

What Your Baby Needs

Your baby spent his first nine months being held, rocked and moved around in the womb. He was in constant contact with his mum and could hear her heartbeat, her voice, feel the warmth of her body and the sensation of being tightly held. He expected things to continue like this after birth: being in constant contact with another human being, feeling warm, snug and secure. If he thinks has been abandoned, he cries, a response that has evolved over millions of years to make sure a responsible adult picks him up and keeps him safe. If he is hungry, uncomfortable, tired or bored he will cry.

How to Help Your Baby

A psychologist called Maslow pointed out that in order for human beings to be fulfilled, reach their potential and enjoy life – ‘reach self-actualization’ is how he put it – they need to have their basic needs met. You can’t sit and concentrate on a book or film if you are hungry, thirsty or need the toilet. Great philosophy or art will pass you by if you are homeless and worried about your safety.

Babies are like this, too – if their basic needs are not met, they cannot be happy and secure, and although there are lots of similarities between adult needs and baby needs, there are differences, too.

We all need to have enough to eat and drink, and we need to have times to rest and sleep. We all need to feel safe – for grown-ups this might mean that the rent or mortgage is paid or that our homes are secure and we can sleep soundly at night – but for your baby, feelings about safety are a little different. Babies expect adults to fend off danger, so for your baby, safety is about human companionship. If there is a reliable grown-up nearby, then he can relax.

For your baby to feel happy and contented, you need to fulfil his three basic needs:

• Contact

• Food

• Sleep

Over time, the way you meet these needs, and the balance between them, changes. This is perhaps one of the most difficult things to grasp in parenting – the rules change all the time, and what worked today will no longer be appropriate tomorrow. Where we often go wrong is in thinking that methods stay constant.

For instance, feeding a baby whenever he is hungry, day or night, is perfectly appropriate at two weeks, but is no longer appropriate at two years. Sharing your bedroom, if not your bed, with a baby of five weeks is safe and easy; sharing your bed with a five-year-old is less easy; sharing your bed with a fifteen-year-old would certainly be odd! Responding the instant your baby cries when he is little is appropriate; responding to a toddler who is yelling for sweets is not kind in the long run.

Every healthy baby wants to communicate, will make demands and will make his presence felt. Initially, the only way he knows how to get your attention is by crying. In general, if you understand and work within his needs, he will not need to cry for prolonged periods and you and he will enjoy plenty of positive and happy times together.

This does not mean endless self-sacrifice on your behalf: normally, your needs and your baby’s needs will not fundamentally conflict, because nature has designed a system that works in harmony with you both.

What This Book Can Do for You

This book is fundamentally different from the many other parenting books on the shelves. Some books cast you loose, tell you to trust your instincts and leave you to get on with it. If anything, they hope that if you respond to your baby all the time without question, he will eventually just evolve into the kind of child that you would like him to be. Most parents need more reassurance and guidance than that.

Other books – and this is a more popular approach at the moment – impose on your baby a rigid schedule from the day he is born. However, unless this particular schedule happens to suit you and your baby, you are probably both going to be unhappy with it. If it does work for you, the chances are that this is the schedule or routine you would both have arrived at anyway!

Then there is a third way, a middle way, which is to understand your baby’s needs, respond to them appropriately, and to introduce the routines and boundaries your child wants – but at the right times and in a way that does not fundamentally conflict with your own needs. Babycalming follows this third way and shows you what is appropriate and when. It is a three-step plan based on your baby’s three basic needs for contact, food and sleep, and it will also help you to devise and settle into a routine that is right for you both.

It is a combination of tried-and-tested methods from my experience as an NCT (National Childbirth Trust) breastfeeding counsellor and mother of three, and research-based evidence.

Throughout the book you will find quotations from different experts, philosophers and public figures regarding children and childcare over the last couple of centuries. They are quoted at the beginning of each chapter, then at the end you will find out when it was said. You will see that some opinions on childcare haven’t changed at all, whereas others will seem completely inappropriate. They are there to remind you that opinions on childcare change all the time, and that as a parent you can only do what you think is best for your baby at the present time according to all the information and advice you have at that moment.

With this in mind, try not to worry or feel guilty if you find it overwhelming being a parent, or if you are unsure that you are doing the right thing for your baby. Instead, enjoy your baby, celebrate his presence in your life and know that if you can meet his three basic needs for contact, food, and sleep, you will be well on the way to bringing up a happy and contented baby.

Your Baby from Birth to Toddlerhood

1 Why Do Babies Cry?

~ Times change – does the advice stay the same? ~

At no previous time has there been such a wide general interest in all that concerns childhood, as shown by the numerous books constantly issuing from the press upon these subjects and the periodicals devoted to the different phases of the child problem.

Most people can ignore all sorts of noise – the buzz of conversations, engine noises, even the radio or TV – but the instant a baby starts crying, everyone looks tense. They need it to stop.

Your baby’s appearance is designed to make you want to take care of him; he has a smooth, round forehead, big eyes, a head that’s large in proportion to his body – in all mammals this signals, ‘I’m a baby – take care of me!’ In the same way, the sound of your baby’s crying is designed to make sure you attend to him – now! We all react to the sound of a baby’s cry with increased heart rate, raised blood pressure and sweating – the common reactions to stress. A baby’s cry is meant to be stressful, to evoke an instant response.

How Easy Is It to Tell Why Your Baby Is Crying?

Mothers quickly become tuned in to their own baby’s crying, so well in fact that after only three nights in a postnatal ward, a new mother can pick out her own baby’s cries in her sleep.¹

However, although you will quickly learn to identify your own baby’s cry, it’s not like a language where such-and-such a cry means, ‘I’m hungry!’ while another cry means, ‘I’m bored!’ With most babies, what varies is only the intensity and volume of their cry, rather than its tone or content, though as your baby gets older he will be more sophisticated at letting you know what he wants.

We know this from research. In one study, researchers played two tapes to mothers: one was of a one-month-old hungry baby, the other was of a newborn baby who’d just been circumcised. When the mothers were asked whether the babies were hungry, sleepy, in pain, angry, startled or wet, only 25 per cent could correctly identify the hungry baby (40 per cent thought he was over-tired), while for the other tape, only 40 per cent could identify the pain cry correctly, with 30 per cent thinking he was startled or angry² Another piece of research, from Finland, asked 80 very experienced baby nurses to listen to recordings of babies crying. Once again, even with their experience, they were correct only 50 per cent of the time.³

Some researchers have tried analysing babies’ cries using acoustical measuring equipment. People like Barry Lester at Brown University have found that a baby’s cry may be significantly different when he has certain medical conditions; for instance, a malnourished baby has a weaker cry, while babies with cri-du-chat, a chromosome disorder, also have a distinctive cry. However, apart from these unusual examples, it seems impossible to classify the average baby’s cry as a precise language.

DID YOU KNOW?

– babies know more about crying than you do!

Researchers played tape-recordings of crying babies to newborns, and discovered that at birth they could distinguish their own cries from those of other babies. Hearing another newborn baby cry was also likely to start ‘sympathy’ crying in these listening newborns, but they were not disturbed by computer-simulated cries, a crying baby chimpanzee or even a crying, five-month-old baby.⁴

This does not mean it’s not worth trying to understand your baby’s cries! In time you probably will get to know what your baby wants, not by interpreting his cry, but by coming to know who he is, what he likes, and of course by the context: whether he has been fed recently, needs a sleep, and so on.