The sleep environment: Swaddling and white noise
Always remember the SIDS safe sleep guidelines and promote these.
Swaddling and white noise can be amazing tools in helping a newborn baby to sleep and settle well, but they have to be used in the right way.
Swaddling
Swaddling is one of the most effective ways of making a newborn feel more comfortable. It mimics the feeling of being in utero, where they were curled into a tiny ball and had very little room around them. This is particularly important in the 4th trimester when baby is still getting used to the world around them and starting to understand that they are a separate person to mum.
Babies are born with a set of reflexes that occur naturally and start to reduce over time. These include:
- the sucking reflex
- the rooting reflex
- the stepping reflex
- the tonic neck reflex
- the grasp reflex
- And the moro, or ‘startle’ reflex, which is the one we are most interested in when it comes to sleep.
The moro reflex is mostly triggered in response to sound. Baby will throw their head backwards and then throw their legs and arms outwards, which will often then wake them up. With all the space that they now have around them, experiencing this reflex feels very different to being in utero, so it is no wonder they are likely to wake from it. However, if they experience it within a swaddle, their reflex movements will be more restricted and more similar to the womb experience, and therefore baby is more likely to stay asleep. We don’t want to have to tiptoe around a sleeping baby, as we want baby to be able to sleep with noise around. By swaddling baby, the moro reflex will be less of a problem when sleeping and hopefully allow baby to sleep more comfortably without waking themselves up.
Swaddle safety
Since research came out surrounding swaddling and hip dysplasia (suggesting that swaddling can increase the risk of this), lots of health professionals changed their minds and stopped recommending swaddling. It is now hit and miss as to whether it will be recommended or not by a midwife and for this reason, I am seeing fewer swaddled babies than I did ten years ago, when it was more the norm.
Advice has now changed to reflect the research and swaddling is recommended as long as it is done loosely over the hip joints – which you can see in my video. This means that you are mostly swaddling the upper part of baby, not from the hips and below. There should be no issue with baby’s hips if done correctly.
Since this research and also the back to back campaign (where it is advised babies are put on their backs to sleep rather than their fronts), you can see how now it is actually much harder for a baby to sleep well. You may well have had well-meaning comments from older family members about how babies in their day ‘just slept’ and have thought that they had just forgotten how hard it is to have a new baby. This may well be the case, but the reality is that babies did sleep better ‘in their day’, because the startle reflex was easily reduced by sleeping on tummies.
Whilst I would not recommend sleeping a baby on their front, and would always advise parents to follow the safe sleep guidelines, I would consider swaddling baby so that they feel safe and contained as they did when growing in the womb. In the early weeks, this can be one of the biggest helps for getting some longer stretches of sleep.
How to swaddle: