Babycalming: Simple Solutions for a Happy Baby. Caroline Deacon

By now you will probably be learning to read your baby’s cues and can tell when he is hungry. If he cries, therefore, you might try comforting him in other ways than feeding.

      Step Two: Comfort

      At this stage, your baby will still fuss and cry a lot: time spent crying reaches a peak at around six weeks and declines by three or four months. Rocking, carrying and the techniques we looked at for the first six weeks will still work now. In fact at around six months, your baby’s vestibular system (which detects movement and gravity, so it’s how we keep our sense of balance) is at its most sensitive, and it is good to stimulate it through movement. That’s why many babies love those baby-bouncers you can hang in the doorway. Older children, too, love swings and roundabouts for the same reason, because they stimulate their sense of balance and co-ordination.

      Although your baby at six weeks is developing social skills and interacting with you, he is still very dependent, easily tired or over-stimulated, and fussing or colicky behaviour will be common. That’s why routines can help; if your baby begins to perceive a predictable pattern to his day, it means he has less to cope with, less to take in. If your baby fusses a lot, have another look at Step Two (pages 65–112) for detailed suggestions on soothing him, and also pages 83–112 for information about colic.

      Your baby’s favourite sound at this age is ‘motherese’,³ which is that special, high-pitched, nonsense, singsong language women use when they talk to babies. You might feel daft doing this, but you will probably find it comes naturally, and babies love it. It helps them, in turn, learn to speak far more easily!

       MUM, I’M BORED! ENTERTAINING YOUR BABY

      Even tiny babies are intelligent, capable human beings, and they are skilled at forming relationships. Babies hate being bored, just like the rest of us, and once they have got over the birth and initial settling into the world, they don’t want to be tucked up in a cot all day: they want to get out and mix with people.

      It doesn’t mean you have to spend hours waving rattles in his face, but tiptoeing around a quiet house to let him sleep does nothing for the baby who wants noise and action. Let him be where he can see you and enjoy your company. Prop him somewhere safe where he can watch you do things; chat to him and tell him what you’re up to. You can hang a mobile where he can look at it. Watching you, though, is often what he loves best!

      Of course your baby will love it when you do find time to play with him. Repetitive games, especially where he has to respond and interact, like peek-a-boo or round and round the garden, will not only be his favourites, they also help him lay down the building blocks for the acquisition of language.

      • You are still going to be spending a lot of time at this stage, soothing your baby, in similar ways to the first six weeks. As the first few months pass, you will find this gets easier. Predictable routines may help both of you cope with the day.

      Step Three: Sleep

      It is still safer to share a room with your baby at this stage, and it’s also safe to share a bed as long as you’re careful (see page 174). You will be hoping that he might begin sleeping through the night.

      The first step towards this is to help your baby fall asleep on his own in the evenings, so if you haven’t yet started a bedtime routine, you might like to look at how to do this in Step Three (pages 137–43).

       DID YOU KNOW? – back to sleep, but put him on his front, too!

      Until your baby is rolling over by himself, you still need to put him on his back to sleep. However, recent research suggests that because babies are spending longer on their backs now due to the Back to Sleep Campaign, they are having less tummy-lying so they are slower to roll over, sit, crawl, or pull to stand than babies who used to sleep on their stomachs, although it’s still within normal range. It’s worth thinking about giving your baby a variety of positions during waking hours.⁴

      The next step is to help your baby fall back to sleep on his own during the night – and there are lots of ideas about this in the section on Step Three, too. This is also the time to establish a pattern of daytime naps, so that your baby has definite times for being asleep and being awake, rather than drifting between states as he did in his first six weeks.

      • At this stage, sleeping will still mean room-sharing and perhaps bed-sharing. However, your baby should be developing the skills to help him sleep for longer periods; hopefully you will be settling him to sleep on his own, and helping him develop self-soothing techniques so that he can get back to sleep again when he wakes.

       Our first baby, Summer, had severe colic for six months; we were starting to think it would never end, and then eventually it subsided. We even took her to the doctor after four months of it, to have her checked for something more serious as we couldn’t believe that colic could cause this much pain to a baby.

       It started about 4 p.m. each day and went on until midnight or more. The sound of her screams and crying were so unbearable, it sounded at times as if we were beating the life out of her or something terrible – it was just pure torture. As parents, we felt so helpless – it was horrendous. We went through truckloads of Infacol, gripe water, colic drops, etc. but nothing helped. We tried endless amounts of baby massage, which sometimes soothed her a bit, as did a hot bath, and both of these things made us feel at least like we were doing something constructive to ease her pain.

       – Stephanie, mother to Summer and Eva

       ~ Times Change ~ Answer – 1825 ~

      From Domestic Duties by Mrs Parkes, cited in Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Child-care From Locke to Spock (Jonathan Cape, 1983)

       4 Getting Sociable: Six Months to Two Years

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

      It is very common practice to leave a baby crying for hours on end in his pram outside the house, with nothing to do but a brick wall to see, when all he wants is something to watch.

      For many parents, this stage of babyhood feels like the easiest. Your baby can sit up, but can’t move about too much yet. She can play with toys to a limited extent, and at around nine months¹ she develops the ability to grasp objects between her fingers and thumb, so she gets pretty good at playing with her toys. Many parents don’t really notice this ability emerging, but the use of the opposing thumb is one of the most important evolutionary developments that sets us apart from other apes.

      Now she really feels strong affection for you and for all her immediate family, but this means she hates separation, and it also means she is scared of strangers. One theory about ‘fear of strangers’ is that it serves the same sort of function as imprinting in ducklings. Baby ducks are impelled to follow the first animal they catch sight of straight after hatching (usually, of course, this is their Mum), but human babies can’t walk at birth, so they have developed another way of staying safe. Their method is to make a loud noise when they’re little so that an adult will pick them up and keep them safe. Their cooing and smiling then seduces that adult into wanting to stay near.

      At around eight months, however, babies develop the ability to move and might start to crawl away; that’s when the fear of strangers emerges, thereby keeping a baby safe by ensuring that she will not want to lose sight of her parent.

      Of course the problem for you is that this deep