Doctor Komarovsky about how to wean a child

There are children who cannot fall asleep without motion sickness. They will roar, sob, demand, and, as a rule, will achieve their. Parents who first taught the child to fall asleep, and now they themselves are not happy, turn to pediatricians asking how to wean the baby off their hands.

Dr. Komarovsky, a well-known pediatrician and author of numerous books and articles about children's health, is no exception. He also receives such questions, and he tries to give the most detailed answer. Read his recommendations on how how to quickly put the baby to sleep.

The newborn at the first time after birth is “on the same wavelength” with the mother, the cut umbilical cord only separated from the physical, but the psychological dependence on each other remained. And to a greater extent it is expressed in the child. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that a child who is poorly oriented in the big world in which he has fallen is very important tactile contact with his mother. In practice, it looks like this: the baby is worried - the mother takes him in her arms, the baby feels her presence, hears the voice, recognizes the native smell and calms down.

This is what mothers use, starting from the very first days of independent life of their offspring. He groaned in the crib - the mother is already running and takes on her hands, the baby suffers from colic - the mother is right there on the hands. Very quickly the peanut realizes that it is very easy to get a mother - you just need to shout or at least get angry. However, children up to 2 months practically do not know how to abuse trust, and they really ask for their hands for the reason that they are in dire need.

By 3 months everything is changing. Colic has already subsided or has become more rare, and there is no longer such a big need to run on every squeak of the child, but mother does it out of habit, and the baby begins to like it.

On the one hand, motion sickness is a completely natural physiological and familiar to the newborn rhythm of movements: during the first 9 months his mother’s stomach only did what swayed. But there is absolutely no evidence that after birth, the swing is at least to some extent required by the child. Nature has not provided for this absolutely nothing, because the child himself cannot swing.

It means that all the reasons for rocking baby came up with mom, in order to justify their desire to put the child to sleep as soon as possible and finally take up their own affairs.

Komarovsky argues that there is no particular harm in motion sickness - for the child. There is no benefit either.

If it so happens that the child has already been accustomed to the hands of the child, all the lectures to the parents on how to behave with the crumbs from the first days after their birth, lose their relevance. So moms and dads need a recipe - what exactly needs to be done so that the child stops demanding rocking and carrying on his hands.

First of all, Yevgeny Komarovsky recommends that you try to calm yourself down by your parents, drink valerian or motherwort, gather your strength and take an irrevocable decision - no longer swing!

Naturally, the child will be indignant. And it will scream, and without stopping, bitterly and inconsolably. But it is necessary to endure. Usually two or three days is enough for the baby to understand that the cry is not the way to achieve the desired. Although the process may be delayed.

You can try to distract the child. If, after being fed, dressed, put in a playpen or a cot, he began to demand that his mother again took him in her arms, give an interesting bright toy, put (put, hang) next to something very interesting, then there is a chance that the baby for a time will forget that he had to get his hands at all costs. Gradually, there will be more such “pauses”.

The faster the crumb will master self-study with something, the sooner it will be possible to wean him from his hands. If the care of the mother is accompanied by a new attack of the ora, you can try to remove slightly - go about your business, being in the same room, and leave the room only for a few minutes. It is important to gradually make absences more private.

The main thing is to learn at this stage that the children's cry does not threaten a bad child. It is more dangerous for parents whose eyelids start to twitch from him and everything falls out of his hands. And the baby can not shout to infinity - the physiological needs in a dream will still prevail, and the baby will fall asleep. You just need to keep spartan calm.

From birth, you should not bring a demonstration of parental adoration to an extreme state - a newborn who does not get away with hands and who are carefully passed on to each other, not forgetting to shake almost constantly - this is not normal. Normally, when a child is taken in hands to feed, change clothes, calm, if something hurts. The child should sleep in his crib, without rocking and mom's presence.

If you decide to disaccustom the child, it is important to remember that there is no going back. If the mother holds out a cry for a day, and surrenders to the second and again takes the baby in her arms and starts pumping, then the process of weaning will be much more difficult, difficult and protracted the next time. If the family declared a struggle with wearing it, regardless of the age of the child (3 months or 6 months - does not matter), it must be decisive.

How to disaccustom the child from hands, doctor Evgenie Komarovsky will tell in the following video.