When Crawling Causes Sleep Disturbances

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Article Summary

Mobility, freedom and exploration are challenging for a baby and can cause short-lived anxiety. If babies feel unsettled, they may find it difficult to sleep. Stick to the established rules, provide lots of reassurance, and these disturbances won't last long. SLEEP

With your first child, you may have noticed changes in his sleep patterns once he started to crawl, and this may happen again with the baby. As her social world expands and she learns to move around alone, she is less dependent on you for her every need.

But these new beginnings of independence can be accompanied by fears about the prospect of being separated from the principal person who provides her with love and security. Basically, she is torn between her natural urge to explore everything combined with her lack of confidence about the implications of her newly found freedom. This anxiety may sometimes affect her sleep, particularly if she awakens to find herself alone and then calls anxiously to you for reassurance.

Use the same rules as in the past: wait a moment to make sure that she is not simply passing from one sleep phase to another, and, if you go in to her, keep the lights dimmed and just stroke her gently, preferably without talking, to reassure her that everything is OK. It is also possible that her new awakenings will temporarily disturb your older child’s sleep, and for him the same rules apply: go in quietly, stroke his head gently to reassure him, and leave him to fall back to sleep.

Usually, during this period, any disturbances in sleep patterns are relatively short-lived.

Category Tags:

Development

,

Sleep

Article Tags:

self confidence

,

crawling

,

motor skills

,

independence