Denise discovered the tightness of the wrap was the secret ingredient for her six-week-old son. “Our running joke was we swaddled Augie so tightly we were scared his eyes would pop out! But swaddling helped him enormously, and tight was exactly the way he needed it to be!”
• Swaddling a baby with bent arms
Even with tight swaddling, it’s easy for your crying baby to wiggle her hands out if she was wrapped with her arms bent. While it’s true that new babies are comforted by having their bodies flexed into the fetal position, and preemies do best with bent arms at least until they reach their due date, babies swaddled with their arms down still have lots of flexion in their legs, fingers, and neck to keep them happy.
Swaddling helped Ted and Shele’s two-month-old daughter, Dylan, sleep through the night. To keep her arms straight, Ted tucked Dylan’s hands under the waistband of her tiny sweatpants before wrapping her. He said, “I have to do this because every time she gets her arms bent, she pops them out and gets even madder.”
• Letting the blanket touch your baby’s cheek
If your baby is hungry and the blanket touches her cheek, it may fool her into thinking it’s your breast, accidentally setting off the powerful rooting reflex and making her cry out of confusion and frustration. To keep the blanket off the face, make it look more like a V-neck sweater.
• Allowing the finished swaddle to pop back open
You never want your baby to be in bed with loose blankets that may get wrapped around her face. So, always use a blanket that is big enough to wrap all the way around and tuck it in tightly to make sure it doesn’t pop open.
Ken and Kristie said, “Whenever Henry sneaks out of his blanket, he cries as if to say, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ We’ve found that securing the wrap with duct tape gives us an extra forty-five minutes of sleep between feedings!”
Dads—The Swaddlers Supreme
I was surprised! I thought my baby girl, Valerie, wouldn’t like to be wrapped, but once swaddled, she calmed within seconds. I even taught a guy in the barbershop how to do it.
Pedro, father of Valerie
If women are from Venus and men are from Mars, then mothers are from Cuddleland and fathers are from Jiggleland! That is to say, men usually handle children much more vigorously than women do. We throw our older kids on the bed, have pillow fights, and hoist them into the air above our heads—but what about tiny babies? How do men handle them?
At first, we are often more intimidated by infants than our wives are; babies seem so tiny and fragile. When we do carry our little ones around, we often hot-potato them back to our wives the moment they cry.
Swaddling, however, is a great way for dads to build confidence. Fathers often have a natural talent for doing the tight wrapping. In my experience, their strength, vigor, and dexterity make them swaddlers supreme!
Mark said, “I can wrap Eli pretty easily. But my wife, Fran, has a hard time swaddling him. I think she’s too timid to do it tightly enough.”