Why Some Families Swaddle, and When Not To
Watch a newborn being wrapped and you can see the moment it takes. The flailing slows, the breath lengthens, the whole small body gives in, and if you've been up since four you may find you do too.
Swaddling has outlasted every fashion in parenting advice, and I've watched a great many come and go, and followed several. Its age isn't evidence that it's safe, mind, and it's entirely optional: plenty of babies settle with their arms free from the start, and the safe-sleep bodies give rules for doing it safely without telling anyone they must.
Families who swaddle usually do it for one practical reason, the startle reflex, and a softer one, routine.
Why some babies settle in a wrap
Nobody knows exactly why a wrap settles some babies. The usual explanation is that even pressure feels familiar after the womb, and that may be so, but it's a guess about what a baby feels, and I'd sooner tell you it's a guess.
Then there's the Moro reflex, the startle that flings her arms wide and wakes her just as she's dropped off. When she's wrapped, her arms stay in place and the startle may pass without waking her. That part is reasonably well observed.
You may see it work within minutes, and you may not. Some babies fuss harder in a wrap, and that's a preference, not a problem to fix.
Does it help them sleep longer?
Sometimes. A 2007 review of the swaddling research in Pediatrics found that, in general, swaddled babies arouse less and sleep longer. That isn't automatically good news. A baby who rouses less easily may also be slower to react if something goes wrong, and researchers have questioned whether fewer arousals is always a good thing, which is one reason the rules on back-sleeping and stopping at rolling aren't optional. The same review found that swaddling combined with sleeping face-down raises the risk of sudden infant death.
The wrap also becomes a cue: muslin, dim light, feed, cot. Babies love repetition, and tired parents learn to love it too, and so, eventually, do grandmothers.
It also travels, which is what I've come to value most. A familiar swaddle makes a nap in a cot at a grandmother's flat feel like a nap at home, because the routine comes with the fabric. I saw it in Hong Kong with a baby who had flown in from far away and slept as though she'd never left home.
Swaddling belongs to the newborn weeks. At her first attempt to roll, which in some babies comes at about two months, it ends and arms-free sleep begins.
Is it safe?
Done properly, it's thought to be safe for a newborn who hasn't started trying to roll. The AAP and The Lullaby Trust give rules for doing it, not a recommendation that every baby be swaddled, and neither says it lowers the risk of sudden infant death. On her back always, snug at the chest and loose at the hips, face clear, nothing loose in the cot beside her, and stopped at her first attempt to roll.
Each rule has a reason behind it, and we've explained them one by one in a separate guide. Read it before the first night, not after, which is when most people get round to it.
The safety rules in full
Mentioned above
What to wrap her in
One large, thin square, as the safe-sleep guidance says. We make ours in bamboo muslin and I'm fond of it, but I can't show you a test proving it's cooler than a good cotton muslin, so choose on feel and price. With two or three on the go, bedtime never has to wait for the laundry, which in my house it otherwise would.
If the folding puts you off, start with the velcro wrap. It gives the same snug hold with none of the technique, so resettling her at three in the morning is much easier on everybody, including whoever is asleep in the next room.
Swaddling doesn't last, and it isn't meant to. For a few short weeks it gives your baby what she misses most, the feeling of being held, while you finally get some rest. Then it's over and she's a different baby. I forget how long each of mine was swaddled. Weeks, all of them.
And when those weeks end, the muslin keeps going: folded over your shoulder, spread on the floor as a play mat, across a cafe table as a nursing cover. Very few things bought for the newborn days earn their keep for so long.
Sources: The Lullaby Trust: Swaddling and slings · American Academy of Pediatrics: A Parent's Guide to Safe Sleep · American Academy of Pediatrics (HealthyChildren.org): Swaddling: Is it Safe for Your Baby? · van Sleuwen et al. (2007), Pediatrics 120(4):e1097-e1106: Swaddling: A Systematic Review
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.
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