my baby has a flat head
a.k.a. wonky head syndrome
I can’t remember who first mentioned it, it could have been our MACH nurse on one of the checkups, or maybe it was just a friend in passing. Reflecting on it, I think it was an off handed comment along the lines of “she has a bit of a flat spot, you might want to encourage her to face the other way when she sleeps”. What I heard at the time though, was “your child’s head is going to be severely deformed forever, and you should spend days googling it and worrying”. And I took the latter advice and spent days googling it. And worrying.
My Google research turned up endlessly contradictory results:
- I have to get a helmet specially made AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
- Newest research show helmets don’t do anything!
- Even newer research shows helmets do do something! Sometimes.
- Focus on encouraging your child to shift head position when they’re sleeping.
I found it really hard to find anything that wasn’t sponsored/funded by a company that sells helmets. In the end, after reading many, many articles, the conclusion I came to was that if the deformation is fairly minor, there is little difference between having a helmet and not and it will generally even out by the time they turn two. If it is moderate to severe, then a helmet can probably help, but even without one it will often improve by the time the baby reaches 2 years old.
In either case, if your baby is developing a flat spot, it is important to encourage them to turn their head the other way when they sleep to try to balance it out and avoid making it progress further. It is, of course, worth talking to a GP as well.
Some time for reflection
After my initial panic, I started looking around. First at myself. I have quite a crooked nose, I always have and have known about it since i was a teenager. What i never realised before though is that I also have a mis-shaped head. In short, I realised that I have mild plagiocephaly. Apart from the nose I had never even realised, and no one else had either.
I started getting my family to put there fingers in there ears so I could look at them from above and see how uneven they were. Turns out plenty of people have uneven heads! The thing is, once you grow hair and your head gets bigger it becomes really hard to notice.
What did we do?
Despite the somewhat normal-ness of the condition, it is no excuse to do nothing about it. In our case it was fairly mild, and the cause was quite clear to us. Our daughter loved to suck on her right hand fingers to go to sleep. Initially it was great, once she started sucking it was almost guaranteed she’d be asleep in minutes. It was comforting for everyone.
We realised this had to change though. But how? My mother-in-law used to put chilli oil on my wife’s hand to stop her sucking on it. This is frowned upon now. We tried a few things – putting a sock on her hand during naps, and putting a band aid on her index and middle finger. For some reason she only like to suck on her middle and ring finger together, the band aid prevented this and was harder to remove than a sock.
If I was feeling confident I would also sneak into her room at times and gently get her to to face the other way. She was a pretty sound sleeper so I could usually get away with it, there was the odd occasion that she would wake up to do this with caution!
She was surprisingly quick to break out of the habit, despite strong initial resistance. We also found as her neck strength grew and she was able to turn her head more she started to change position periodically anyway. Some nights when I’d sneak in to shift her head it would already be facing the other way.
Now she is around two and sure enough it is very hard to notice, I can kind of notice it, but that is because I was a little bit fixated on it for a while and hyper-aware of it.
If you find yourself in a similar position and are worried, definitely see your GP to get an informed opinion. If you have a young baby, I’d suggest at least being aware of it and don’t fall into the trap we did where we thought sucking on her fingers to help settle was a good thing!