Life can be so much easier if you ditch the ‘rules’ and work with – not against – how your little bub is programmed for survival. Obviously, from a biological perspective, there is not much you can change.īut it helps if you understand that your baby needs to feel safe during this early period of her life. Now you understand your baby’s behaviour, but what can you do?
We need to remember that empathy, love and nurturing are key factors in helping our babies develop a secure sense of confidence, independence and self esteem. To them, absence of the caregiver represents danger – it’s a matter of life and death. It’s a realisation that ‘Mum or Dad is leaving and I don’t know when they’ll be back’.Īs far as your baby is concerned, you might as well be in China.īabies’ brains aren’t sufficiently developed to understand distance the way adults can. Separation anxiety is a developmental milestone that also happens in toddlerhood. That’s not to say that only very young babies are clingy and needy. If, for example, you have a 2-month-old, it might help put things into perspective if you remember this: your baby has only been on the planet, outside the womb, for eight weeks.
Read about how to create an awesome fourth trimester and give your baby a gentle transition into the world. What a massive reality shift, suddenly to start feeling all those things! It was a perfect, constant environment, where everything was comfortable. She wasn’t aware of the feeling of air brushing past her body, or the need to pass gas, poo or wee. She’s just arrived from a place where she never felt frightened, hungry or cold. Your baby is not into slavery, manipulation or instant gratification: she’s into a game called survival. Neither is it because they want mama or dada to be wrapped around their little finger. No matter what your well-meaning relatives or friends tell you, babies do not wake from a peaceful sleep simply because they think it’s a great game. Hello, separation anxiety! Babies don’t wake up every time you put them down because they want to annoy you This starts to happen later, somewhere between 6-9 months. Unlike an adult’s brain, a newborn’s brain is not developed enough to grasp the concept that she is a separate person from her mother. “Infants are alerted because, as far as their own body is concerned, they are about to be abandoned, and it is, therefore, time to awaken to call the caregiver back - the very caregiver on whose body the infant’s survival depends”. They feel, through their skin, that something is different, such as missing the softness of the mother’s touch, the heat of mother’s body, the smell of mother’s milk, the gentleness of mother’s moving, breathing chest and the feeling of being protected. “Infants are biologically designed to sense that something dangerous has occurred – separation from the caregiver.
Professor James McKenna, the world’s leading expert on co-sleeping, explains: A baby wakes up when put down because infants are designed to sense separation
We think they’re the best on the internet!Ĭlick to get the FREE weekly updates our fans are RAVING about. Some parents, though, find that waiting longer doesn’t seem to help either, which brings us to the second reason.Īnd unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, it’s not something you can control or change.Īre You Getting BellyBelly’s Baby Week By Week Updates? Part of the problem could be you’ve tried to put your baby down too soon. This means your baby will wake easily if disturbed before this time. It takes up to 20 minutes for babies to reach deep sleep. In desperation, you’re asking, ‘Why does my baby wake up when I put her down?’įirst, it’s important to understand that a baby’s sleep cycle is different from an adult’s. No matter how many times you try, or how deep a sleep you think she’s in, it happens again.Īrghhh! Baby wakes up when I put her down… why? Painfully slowly, and with super-smooth motion, you lower her into bed.īut the minute she hits the mattress, her eyelids fly open and she immediately eyeballs you with the, ‘I can’t believe you just tried to put me down!’ look on her face. You quietly tiptoe towards your baby’s bed, doing your very best not to disturb her. Your baby has finally fallen asleep in your arms, and you want to put her down so you can have a break, go to the toilet or even feed yourself! It’s many a parent’s frustrated cry: ‘Why does my baby wake up when I put her down?’