Swing reliance

Hi there!

Baby is 16 weeks tomorrow and almost exclusively naps in her swing during the day. We get anything from 45 minutes to 2.5h naps, while keeping a close eye on wake windows, and we all absolutely love the swing.

She has been self settling to sleep in her cot at night since around 10 weeks old with the support of a consistent night time routine. She will go down between 8/9pm, has 2-3 feeds in the night, and normally wakes very happy around 7am before going down for her first nap (approx 2h around 1h after waking).

I have two questions:

1. For a few weeks we’ve had signs of the 4mo sleep regression (shorter naps, more night wakings, random early morning wakings etc). I’m wondering if I need to start weaning her off the swing now for day naps as I’m aware sleeping in the swing isn’t recommended so that when the regression passes she has built the right habits or do I wait until we have more consistency in nap times, routine etc/ regression has passed to start weaning her off the swing?

2. Is it normal for her to be so tired an hour after waking up? Is there a way to encourage the first 2h nap to be part of her night time sleep instead (eg earlier bedtime) or is this very common at this age? I’m worried putting her to bed earlier will make her wake up earlier and I don’t know how well I’d be able to handle consistent pre-7am wakeups…

Thank you x

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It's not recommended for babies to sleep in a swing. You could try a couple of different places and see how she settles elsewhere? X

thank you, however I think you may have missed one of the objectives of this post which is around the timing of weaning her off the swing.

Regressions will happen regardless - it happens because they are developing. So whether you wean her off the swing now or later, I don't really think it'll make much difference! But you won't know until you try 😊

Hey !

Congratulations on your little girl. It looks like we live very close to each other 😂. So as you said you want to work away from using the swing. When our little ones are younger they love movement and closeness for naps. So many people say they do naps in the pram and contact napping.

It always depends on our little ones temperaments on how easy it is to change things. You could always just try a cot nap if you wish the first nap of the day is usually the most successful especially if you have tough timings. When you know your LG will fall asleep easily.

If you are moving away from the swing and the cot naps are difficult you could always try motion naps first such as in the pram and Sling then slowly reduce this to then working on naps in the cot. Just brake it down step by step.

Bedtimes tend to become earlier at this age so you can slowly bring that forward definitely. Just bring it forward 15 minutes every few nights.

We only need a certain amount of sleep in

24 hours so if bedtime becomes earlier then it’s likely there will be less day time sleep somewhere.

Hope this helps and makes sense!

Mel - you may even bump into me!

Insta babysleepnurseuk

in our community

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