Phase of not wanting to be rocked to sleep?

[teammccool]

My daughter is 4 1/2 months old and started resisting being rocked to sleeps for naps. She screams and arches her back and spits out the paci. She can't put herself asleep for naps so she needs the rocking to sleep. We just put her in her swing (where she naps) and let her whine for 5-10 minutes and then she is usually tired enought to let us put the paci in and the swing puts her to sleep.

Anyone else go through this? She still let's us rock her to sleep at night (although we put her in crib awake) and she does fine.

[jenny1223]

I haven't been able to rock DS to sleep for a couple months (since about 4 months). He needs to be left alone in order to relax and sleep otherwise he doesn't want to stop playing. He actually fell asleep while I was feeding him a bottle last night and slept in my arms for a few minutes. It was sweet.

[biscoffcookies]

This happened to me. DD had to be rocked to sleep for naps up until recently, and right around that age she started arching and crying when I'd try.

Honestly, what I did was just put her down and let her cry for a few minutes -- seriously, only a couple. When I picked her up she would calm down and be much easier to rock to sleep. I don't know if she just needed to expend energy or what. It only lasted a few weeks, and then she went back to normal.

Someone told me that when they start fighting you like that then it means they are ready not to be rocked, but that wasn't true for my DD. We weren't able to sucessfully sleep train her for nights until about 5.5 months (we tried at 4, but it wasn't working very well -- DD is spirited, so she can cry for awhile if she wants), so we figured that she definitely wasn't ready for nap training (since that is supposed to be harder). FWIW when we nap trained at around 7 months it went very easily - we had already successfully trained for nights and she'd had some practice self soothing at daycare.

[dcrunnergirl]

Jul 20, 2012 8:02:02 GMT -5 teammccool said:

My daughter is 4 1/2 months old and started resisting being rocked to sleeps for naps. She screams and arches her back and spits out the paci. She can't put herself asleep for naps so she needs the rocking to sleep. We just put her in her swing (where she naps) and let her whine for 5-10 minutes and then she is usually tired enought to let us put the paci in and the swing puts her to sleep.

Anyone else go through this? She still let's us rock her to sleep at night (although we put her in crib awake) and she does fine.

We didn't go through this, but if we did, I'd embrace it. A lot of moms have a heck of a time breaking the rocking to sleep habit, so if she's doing it on her own, then don't fight it.

[quickstepstar]

My youngest hasn't liked being rocked to sleep since very early on. So I have been putting her into the crib and she learned to self-sooth. It is great now, I put her down, she wiggles around for a bit and then goes to sleep within 5 min or so. (This is also the kid who hated being swaddled from day 1). We never rocked the twins to sleep.