Why Your Babies Wake Up When You Put Them Down To Sleep

The frustration can’t be explained, when you have carried your baby for hours, danced, kissed cheeks, and sang all the songs your mum and grand-mum used to sing to you. You walk quietly to his/her bed, drop her as gently as humanly possible and then those tiny baby eyes just look at you, as if saying,  “what do you think you are doing?”

You are so tired and angry, you probably just want to lie down or sleep but then your baby starts to cry, thereby increasing your frustration. What do you do then?

The first thing you need to remember is that your baby is coming from a place, (your tummy), where he/she didn’t feel cold or hot, where the wind didn’t blow in her face at times when she wasn’t prepared, where the sun wasn’t a scorching problem.

Lets be honest, 3, 4, 5 months isn’t enough time to just adapt. The reason your baby is waking up is that she feels abandoned, she feels like her source of comfort or protection has been taken away from her. That’s just the way they were designed by God. The worlds leading expert on co-sleeping, Professor James McKenna, explains:

“Infants are biologically designed to sense that something dangerous has occurred separation from the caregiver. 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 smells of mother’s milk, the gentleness of mother’s moving, breathing chest and the feeling of being protected. 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.”

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A newborn cannot understand that you are only going to be gone for the hours that she sleeps, and you would be there when she opens her eyes. So the few things you can do to get past this phase, (it will go by faster than you think, and you’d start to miss it) are:

• Put all your other tasks aside and comfort or hold your baby. Research shows that it takes babies 20 minutes to fall asleep faster than adults. you might just have to wait a bit longer.
• If your baby still doesn’t fall asleep, try getting a baby-sling or baby-carrier, that way, while your baby feels safe and close to you, you have free hands to go on and get other things done.
• Get help or a nanny or ask friends or family that are around to hold your sleeping baby. People are usually smitten by babies, especially when they are asleep.
• Since your baby just needs to know that you are close by, try putting one of your unwashed shirts, (not the sweaty dirty types) on her bed, that way she can smell you and feel you are still so close to her.

Good-luck Mama