My five-month-old won't sleep by herself. She exhausts herself to sleep with screaming and crying. She doesn't even like her car seat. It's just getting worse even though I am doing the same thing every night. She doesn't even like it when I pick her up. I don't know how to teach her to sleep on her own without fighting it.
A baby who isn't the go-right-to-sleep type isn't going to become the type no matter what you do. Put that thought out of your head so you can move on. For your own peace of mind, do also dismiss any stories you might have heard from friends and relatives about how well their babies slept.
They didn’t “teach” their babies to be easygoing – their babies were born that way. Lucky them. Just because they had easygoing babies doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your or your child. If anything, it means those other people couldn't have handled anything other than an easygoing child. Thusly, they are in no way qualified to judge you or your child or to advise you.
Parents of easygoing babies are often heard to say you can spoil a child by holding them too much. This is not true. They think this because their child was so easygoing. They would change their tune if they had had a child who wasn’t easygoing. You can no sooner spoil a baby than you can spoil a car by driving it all the time. Babies are born to be touched and held. This is why babies don't walk until close to their first year of age.
Babies have lots of brain cells, but those brain cells are no good unless they're interconnected. The nerve fibers connecting these cells are called dendrites. The only thing that develops dendrites is touching. There is a direct connection between the development of a baby's brain and how much they are held.
As the mother of one ADHD child and two other children — all grown — I can tell you that while you may spend the first year of that child's life holding her, you will spend the next 10 years chasing after her and the next 10 years after that waiting for her to come hang out with you. She will always come back to you, but only if she knows from her first year of life that you're a consistent, reliable, and loyal source of love.
Read more: http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/a-helping-hand-my-baby-wont/#ixzz0ndvsVjJi
