Swaddling a Baby

Video Transcript

"One thing that many people try to help soothe a crying baby or help a baby to sleep longer, is swaddling. Now you want to check with a couple of things, think about a couple of things before you swaddle. How hot the environment is, there's a debate back and forth that a baby can become overheated if they're swaddled and make may cause other issues. So, either way that you lean just make sure that the baby's not going to be overheating inside their blanket. Make sure they're comfortable and I will show you how to swaddle a baby. If you haven't already leaned, often your taught by your health care provider. If you had a Doula, Midwife or if your baby was born in a hospital, that person, often a Nurse, often shows you how to swaddle. But in case you haven't learned yet let me show you what that looks like. One thing to keep in mind is you only want to swaddle a baby up till the age of about one month. Beyond that, swaddling, because it's done very snug and tight, can restrict some motor development. So we want to be careful that we're not doing that. If a baby ever is becoming uncomfortable in the swaddle or really trying to help free themselves, might be a good idea to start thinking about not swaddling. There's lots of other things you can do. But in case you want to swaddle, here's how we do it. Take baby and we're going to lay them down on their blanket we folded the top corner of the blanket down, his head's going to lay just above that folded down corner and we'll take one side, fold it up and over tucking it all the way underneath and behind the baby, making it nice and snug, folding up the bottom, giving a little tug because we want this very snug and then taking the other side wrapping it all the way over. Now it looks a little bit loose, so we want to lift baby up, folding it nice and snug all the way around. So baby's wrapped in a little bundle. One thing we want to be careful of with swaddling, again that it's nice and snug and that cloth isn't covering baby's face. So if you didn't get it right the first time, just try again. It takes a few times to learn, to practice and learn how to use swaddling."