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3 Learning about Routines: Six Weeks to Six Months

~ Times change – does the advice stay the same? ~

The cry of an infant should never be disregarded. It is Nature’s Voice.

For many parents, this stage is when they feel that they fall in love with their babies for the first time – and no wonder! The first smile, the first laugh, the coos and babbles – babies of this age can be adorable.

You are beginning to recover from the birth, you are feeling perhaps that you have your head above water – now is the time you can start to think about getting your life into a routine.

Sociable Babies

From birth, your baby can make facial movements, and if these are treated as smiles, then smiles they become. Babies of all cultures start smiling, even if they are blind, so this is truly something we are pre-programmed to do.

Babies can also vocalize from birth, but ‘proto-conversation’ or ‘early conversation’ also gets going around now, and continues until about six months. It may just look as if your baby is cooing and waving his hands around, but researchers have found that babies are mimicking the intonation of what will be their native tongue, and their hand movements keep time with the conversations around them. If you talk to your baby, he will listen, and when you pause, he will respond – he is making conversation!¹

You may notice that your baby often stares at you now – this prolonged eye contact is what helps mums fall in love with their babies; in fact, psychologists have called this ‘obligatory looking’, as babies can get ‘stuck’ staring at something, unable to look away!

Step One: Feeding

If you are breastfeeding, your milk supply should be well established by six weeks, and so now it is far easier to mould and adapt a feeding pattern to suit you and your family’s needs. If you are thinking about giving your baby bottles at some stage, perhaps because you will be returning to work soon, then six weeks is a great age to introduce these – your baby should be able to adapt to the new sucking technique without it interfering with his ability to breastfeed.

By now you may see some sort of pattern to your baby’s feeding, and you can perhaps start to negotiate a routine that would suit you better. Perhaps you would like him to feed a little longer in the afternoon and early evening so he may go longer between feeds at night. If he is a very ‘suckly’ baby, let him suck his fingers or thumbs, or you might want to introduce a dummy – have a look at the chapter called Your Baby’s Need to Suckle (page 59) for more on this.

He will still rely just on breastmilk or formula for nutrition at this stage; the latest research suggests that there is no benefit, and perhaps some disadvantage, in introducing solids before six months.² If your baby suddenly seems very hungry, it may well be that he is going through an ‘appetite spurt’ – this is where your baby feeds a lot for a short space of time to increase the milk supply – it’s a bit like changing gear in a car!

Sometimes a period of intense feeding happens just before your baby falls ill, and research now suggests that babies can alert their mothers’ immune system to any germs they have picked up, by leaving these on the breast skin. The breastmilk will then convey the appropriate antibodies in the next feed. Amazing!

• Feeding at this stage should begin to fall into a pattern; it will be easier to space feeds out and predict things now. There will still be times when your baby feeds a lot – usually due to illness or a growth spurt. Solids are not recommended at this stage, but if you’d like your baby to learn how to feed from a bottle, now is a good time to introduce one.

• By now you will probably be learning to read your baby’s cues and can tell when he is hungry. If he cries, therefore, you might try comforting him in other ways than feeding.

Step Two: Comfort

At this stage, your baby will still fuss and cry a lot: time spent crying reaches a peak at around six weeks and declines by three or four months. Rocking, carrying and the techniques we looked at for the first six weeks will still work now. In fact at around six months, your baby’s vestibular system (which detects movement and gravity, so it’s how we keep our sense of balance) is at its most sensitive, and it is good to stimulate it through movement. That’s why many babies love those baby-bouncers you can hang in the doorway. Older children, too, love swings and roundabouts for the same reason, because they stimulate their sense of balance and co-ordination.

Although your baby at six weeks is developing social skills and interacting with you, he is still very dependent, easily tired or over-stimulated, and fussing or colicky behaviour will be common. That’s why routines can help; if your baby begins to perceive a predictable pattern to his day, it means he has less to cope with, less to take in. If your baby fusses a lot, have another look at Step Two (pages 65–112) for detailed suggestions on soothing him, and also pages 83–112 for information about colic.

Your baby’s favourite sound at this age is ‘motherese’,³ which is that special, high-pitched, nonsense, singsong language women use when they talk to babies. You might feel daft doing this, but you will probably find it comes naturally, and babies love it. It helps them, in turn, learn to speak far more easily!

MUM, I’M BORED! ENTERTAINING YOUR BABY

Even tiny babies are intelligent, capable human beings, and they are skilled at forming relationships. Babies hate being bored, just like the rest of us, and once they have got over the birth and initial settling into the world, they don’t want to be tucked up in a cot all day: they want to get out and mix with people.

It doesn’t mean you have to spend hours waving rattles in his face, but tiptoeing around a quiet house to let him sleep does nothing for the baby who wants noise and action. Let him be where he can see you and enjoy your company. Prop him somewhere safe where he can watch you do things; chat to him and tell him what you’re up to. You can hang a mobile where he can look at it. Watching you, though, is often what he loves best!

Of course your baby will love it when you do find time to play with him. Repetitive games, especially where he has to respond and interact, like peek-a-boo or round and round the garden, will not only be his favourites, they also help him lay down the building blocks for the acquisition of language.

• You are still going to be spending a lot of time at this stage, soothing your baby, in similar ways to the first six weeks. As the first few months pass, you will find this gets easier. Predictable routines may help both of you cope with the day.

Step Three: Sleep

It is still safer to share a room with your baby at this stage, and it’s also safe to share a bed as long as you’re careful (see page 174). You will be hoping that he might begin sleeping through the night.

The first step towards this is to help your baby fall asleep on his own in the evenings, so if you haven’t yet started a bedtime routine, you might like to look at how to do this in Step Three (pages 137–43).

DID YOU KNOW? – back to sleep, but put him on his front, too!

Until your baby is rolling over by himself, you still need to put him on his back to sleep. However, recent research suggests that because babies are spending longer on their backs now due to the Back to Sleep Campaign, they are having less tummy-lying so they are slower to roll over, sit, crawl, or pull to stand than babies who used to sleep on their stomachs, although it’s still within normal range. It’s worth thinking about giving your baby a variety of positions during waking hours.⁴

The next step is to help your baby fall back to sleep on his own during the night – and there are lots of ideas about this in the section on Step Three, too. This is also the time to establish a pattern of daytime naps, so that your baby has definite times for being asleep and being awake, rather than drifting between states as he did in his first six weeks.

• At this stage, sleeping will still mean room-sharing and perhaps bed-sharing. However, your baby should be developing the skills to help him sleep for longer periods; hopefully you will be settling him to sleep on his own, and helping him develop self-soothing techniques so that he can get back to sleep again when he wakes.

Our first baby, Summer, had severe colic for six months; we were starting to think it would never end, and then eventually it subsided. We even took her to the doctor after four months of it, to have her checked for something more serious as we couldn’t believe that colic could cause this much pain to a baby.

It started about 4 p.m. each day and went on until midnight or more. The sound of her screams and crying were so unbearable, it sounded at times as if we were beating the life out of her or something terrible – it was just pure torture. As parents, we felt so helpless – it was horrendous. We went through truckloads of Infacol, gripe water, colic drops, etc. but nothing helped. We tried endless amounts of baby massage, which sometimes soothed her a bit, as did a hot bath, and both of these things made us feel at least like we were doing something constructive to ease her pain.

– Stephanie, mother to Summer and Eva

~ Times Change ~ Answer – 1825 ~

From Domestic Duties by Mrs Parkes, cited in Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Child-care From Locke to Spock (Jonathan Cape, 1983)