recently my wife has been putting our son on the bed at night and shakes the bed around him so that he can go to sleep. he is teething and having a hard time sleeping through the night. this seems to help him fall back asleep but I just wanted to know if it is dangerous or not. is there any risks of him developing shaken baby syndrome by shaking the bed fast to make you go to sleep?
I would invest in a "massage mat" that vibrates to put under the crib sheet. We had a crib with built in vibration and it really helped my girls get to sleep.
I would assume that shaking the crib would have to depend on how hard it is shaken. I would find a safer alternative just to be safe.
If she is simulating a vibrating motion rather than shaking violently I think it is fine.
As long as his head is not flopping around, it should be fine. Shaken baby syndrome results with the head flops around and the brain gets bruised.
I would recommend reading Dr. Harvey Karp's Happiest Baby on the Block. My daughter used to have a really hard time sleeping when she was a baby and I used that method to get her to sleep and it saved us. One of the things he says is to shake/jiggle...you have to do it hard enough that the baby's head jiggles a bit from side to side. I used to put my daughter in the stroller and then shake it...it seemed like I was shaking it REALLY hard, and most people thought I was nuts, but her head only moved a couple of centimeters from side to side....not a huge movement. And it was the ONLY thing that worked with my daughter and I was the only one it worked for because no one else dared to do it hard enough. But my daughter is now almost 7 and she's reading 2 grade levels above her age, scored in the top 20% of kids in the country for math, reading, etc...so I'm pretty sure she's not brain damaged or anything. But that book describes the motion and what's safe, etc.
Vibrating the bed isn't the same as forcibly shaking a child so that their head whips back and forth causing brain injury. No worries! :-)
