How to stop rocking your baby or toddler to sleep
Rocking to sleep, like feeding to sleep is known as a sleep association. Put simply, a sleep association is how your child “associates”, “knows” how to fall asleep.
Adults can also have sleep associations such as wearing eye masks, noise machines, ear plugs or other rituals/routines that help them to feel safe to fall asleep.
Sleep associations can be normal and natural. The main difference between adults and children is adults are likely to be able to transition through and between their sleep cycles without waking. They have had years of practice and have learnt this skill. That is unless they have a health condition or a disorder that affects their sleep.
Whereas children do not yet know how to do this. They know what they know. For example if your child falls asleep rocking at bedtime or naptime, then they will need exactly the same when they wake from a short nap or if they wake at night.
Rocking to sleep maybe impacting your child’s ability to fall asleep independently. However, to reassure you, a sleep association isn’t usually the only reason why your baby or toddler is waking or in the night or taking shorter naps. Although it is likely to play a part.
If you have a newborn or very young baby, then I wouldn’t expect for your baby to fall asleep independently. However, you can very gently start to introduce the foundations by introducing other gentle ways for them to fall asleep. For example, patting, shushing, cuddling, feeding to drowsy, walking etc.
Here are my 4 first gentle steps on how to stop rocking your baby to sleep
Reduce overtiredness
An overtired baby or toddler is likely to resist sleep and not be accepting of changing their known sleep association. If your child is overtired, they are likely to cry and be distressed which makes everything stressful for everyone involved. Try to make sure naps are optimised before you start to remove rocking to sleep. If that hasn’t gone to plan or your child no longer naps, then try to bring bedtime earlier.
Start at bedtime
I recommend starting to remove rocking to sleep at bedtime only. This is because melatonin (the sleepy hormone) surges in the evening, which can make the changes easier for you. This allows you to not worry about the night times and naps to start with.
Use lower energy movement
Rocking a baby or toddler is very tiring when you are already exhausted. If you have an older baby it can also be a back breaker. Using lower energy movements for yourself will be important so you can conserve energy. Where possible try using movement in different ways such a buggy/stroller walks, sling/carrier walks, car journeys.
Scale down
The kind way to remove rocking to sleep is to scale down the sleep association first. This means to decrease the amount of time you rock for or the speed of the movement. For example ,if you are vigorously rocking, then try to rock to drowsy and then sway to sleep. Or if you are already doing this, then from sway to sleep to sway to drowsy. You can try to introduce another sleep association such as patting in arms.
There are my 4 first steps on how to remove rocking to sleep.
