3 September 2026 · Roshni Mahtani Cheung
Cofounder, Little Rei · Mum of one
She hated thick clothes but slept best swaddled. It took me ten years to work out why.
Shan is ten now. She sleeps well, and has done for years, and the reason turns out to be almost embarrassingly simple: soft sheets, soft clothes, and nothing that traps heat.
I did not know any of that when she was a baby. What I knew then was that she was awake. She tossed and turned for half the night, most nights, and she was fussy in a way I could never pin to anything. I went through the list every parent goes through — hungry, wind, too warm, teeth, a leap, illness coming — and none of it explained a pattern that never really stopped.
The part I could not make sense of was the contradiction.
The contradiction that confused me for years
She hated thick clothes. Anything heavy or stiff and she would arch and squirm and make it very clear.
But she wanted to be held. I carried her everywhere, and being against me was the thing that settled her fastest.
Shan asleep on me at a few weeks old. Being held was always the thing that worked fastest. Photograph by Cici McCalman, BambooShoots Photo.
And she slept best swaddled — wrapped firmly, arms in. Which made no sense to me at all. How does a baby who objects to a thick sleepsuit want to be wrapped up tight?
The answer, which I only understand now, is that those are two separate things. I had been treating them as one.
Pressure and texture are not the same channel
Occupational therapists draw a distinction here that I wish somebody had drawn for me at the time. Firm, even pressure — a hug, a carry, a snug wrap — tends to settle a child's nervous system. Light, unpredictable touch and rough or heavy texture tend to do the opposite: they alert, and they irritate.
For a child who is over-responsive to touch, those two run in opposite directions. Deep pressure is often welcome. A stiff label at the back of the neck is not.
Which is exactly Shan. She was never objecting to being contained. She was objecting to the cloth. Wrapped firmly in a thin muslin she slept; in anything thicker she fought it — and I spent months concluding she had gone off swaddling, when what she had gone off was the fabric I happened to be swaddling her in.
Wrapped firmly, arms in, in a thin muslin. This is the version that worked — and it looks almost identical to the version that did not.
Breathability turned out to matter as much as softness, and here that is not a coincidence. A thick wrap in Singapore is a hot wrap. A baby who is too warm and a baby who is bothered by her fabric look identical from the doorway, and Shan was regularly both at once.
The blanket, and the frozen toes
Here is the detail that finally settled it for me, years later.
When she was older she would throw her blanket off. Not kick it loose in her sleep — throw it off, deliberately, because she could not stand how thick it was.
And then her toes would be freezing. Properly, startlingly cold. And rather than pull the blanket back over herself, she would work her feet under my legs and steal the warmth off me.
Older, and no blanket on her. She would rather be cold than have that particular weight on top of her.
That gesture is the whole thing in miniature. She was not too warm. She was cold — and she still would not have the blanket, because the problem was never temperature. It was the cloth. She wanted the warmth. She just wanted it delivered by a person.
It also breaks a rule I would otherwise have believed, and one that most sleep advice repeats: a child who kicks the covers off is too hot. Sometimes. Not always. Shan threw hers off and was genuinely cold underneath it, and if I had read that as overheating I would have taken a layer away and made her colder.
Cold hands and feet on their own are normal in children and are not a reliable guide to whether they are warm enough — that is true and it is in our own guides. What was telling was the pairing: refusing the cover, and seeking out warmth from a person, at the same time. That combination is not a temperature signal at all.
So if she throws the covers off, check the back of her neck for whether she is actually too warm. Then ask a completely separate question about the cover itself — how heavy is it, what does it feel like, and would she accept a thinner one? For us the answer was always a thinner one.
How common this actually is
I assumed for a long time that Shan was unusual. She is not.
Ben-Sasson, Carter and Briggs-Gowan surveyed 925 children aged seven to eleven and found that 16% of parents reported at least four tactile or auditory sensations that bothered their child. Roughly one in six.
The same group also followed children from infancy into primary school, and that is the finding that stopped me. The pattern begins in the first year. It is already there, in the cot, in the tossing and the fussing — and it is almost never recognised then, because a baby has no way to tell you and because nothing about it is a change.
Same baby, same wrap, thicker cloth. For months I read this as a baby who had gone off being swaddled.
That is the trap, and it is worth naming. Every other reason a baby is unsettled is a change: a tooth, a leap, a hot week, an illness on the way. This one is a constant. So it does not present as a cause. It presents as her personality.
What carrying her actually gave me
One thing I would say to anybody in the middle of this: I carried Shan constantly, and it is the only reason I have any of this information at all.
You notice things against your own body that you cannot see from across a room. When she stiffened. What she settled into. Which tops made her squirm within a minute of going on.
I was not collecting evidence and I did not join it up at the time — I am not going to pretend otherwise. But ten years later, when the pattern finally made sense, all of it was sitting there to look back on. The noticing is what made the joining-up possible eventually, and the noticing is free.
What I would check now, before buying anything
If I had that year again, I would run all of these before deciding it was a phase. Every one of them costs nothing and uses what is already in the house.
- Cut the labels out. All of them, on everything she sleeps in. Cheapest test there is, and the one I would now do first.
- Turn a seamed sleepsuit inside out for two or three nights and watch what happens.
- Wash the sheet again with no fabric softener at all. Softener works by leaving a coating on the fibre, which is precisely what sensitive skin does not want.
- Swap anything synthetic for the thinnest, softest, most breathable thing already in the drawer. Not a new one — the one you have.
- Rule out temperature first, and properly. In this climate it is more often the answer and it is faster to test.
- Change one thing at a time and give it two or three nights. Changing four things at once tells you nothing, which I can confirm, because that is what I did.
What I would not do is the thing I actually did, which was to decide the swaddle had stopped working and abandon it. It had not stopped working. The wrap was right and the cloth was wrong, and those are very different problems with very different answers.
The guides that cover the parts of this properly
Ten years on
Shan still sleeps with her Little Rei pillow, and has for years. There is a small one that lives in the car, which she sleeps on all the way to school, and it is what she reaches for on a long drive without thinking about it.
It is also, to my mild amusement, her favourite present to give her friends.
One thing to be plain about, because this is largely a baby guide and Shan is ten. A pillow is not a baby object. Under twelve months there is no pillow, no soft toy and no loose bedding in a cot at all, and a first sleeping pillow usually waits until a child moves out of a cot and into a bed — commonly somewhere between eighteen months and three years. We have written that out properly elsewhere and none of it has changed. The pillow is the end of this story, not the beginning of it.
Where I stop being useful
I am a mother, and I run a textile company. I am not a clinician, and material sensitivity is not a thing to diagnose from a blog post — least of all one written by somebody who sells sheets.
If sensitivity to texture, sound or light is marked, get it assessed rather than managed at home. The American Academy of Pediatrics is explicit that sensory processing disorder should not be used as a standalone diagnosis, and that a child with pronounced sensory difficulty should be properly evaluated, because it can sit alongside things worth identifying early. That is a conversation with a doctor, not a change of bedding.
What I can tell you is only the thing I actually know. I spent a year hunting for what had changed when nothing had changed, and the answer was in my hands the entire time.
Questions parents ask
Can a baby be sensitive to fabric?
Yes. Some babies are bothered — not allergic, bothered — by seams, stiff labels, fabric-softener residue and heavy or non-breathable cloth. It shows up as tossing, waking and general fussiness rather than as anything you can see, and because it is constant rather than a change it is usually read as temperament. Test it for free first: cut the labels out, skip the softener, and swap synthetics for the thinnest, softest thing you already own.
Why would a baby hate thick clothes but still like being swaddled?
Because pressure and texture are different things. Firm, even pressure from a carry or a snug wrap tends to calm a child, while rough or heavy texture tends to irritate. A baby can want to be wrapped tightly and still object to the cloth she is being wrapped in — so a baby who fights a thick swaddle may settle in a thin muslin one. The wrap is not the problem; the fabric is.
How common is sensitivity to materials in children?
More common than most parenting guidance suggests. In a survey of 925 children aged seven to eleven, 16% of parents reported at least four tactile or auditory sensations that bothered their child — roughly one in six. Follow-up work by the same researchers traced the pattern back into infancy, which is where it begins and where it is very rarely recognised.
Should I get my child assessed for sensory sensitivity?
If sensitivity to texture, sound or light is pronounced, yes — see a doctor rather than managing it with bedding. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that sensory processing disorder should not be used as a standalone diagnosis and that children with marked sensory difficulty should be evaluated properly, because it can occur alongside conditions worth identifying early.
Sources
- Ben-Sasson, Carter & Briggs-Gowan (2009), Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 37(5):705-716 — Sensory Over-Responsivity in Elementary School: Prevalence and Social-Emotional Correlates
- Ben-Sasson et al. — The Development of Sensory Over-responsivity From Infancy to Elementary School
- AAP Section on Complementary and Integrative Medicine & Council on Children with Disabilities (2012), Pediatrics 129(6):1186 — Sensory Integration Therapies for Children With Developmental and Behavioral Disorders
- Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust — Sensory strategies: what type of sensory input do I need?
This guide is general information, written to help you understand a topic and ask better questions — it is not medical advice and does not replace your own doctor, midwife or paediatrician. Anything that worries you about your baby belongs with them.