The biggest annoyance for almost every new parent is a baby who wakes up in the middle of the night and won’t let anyone go back to bed.
Lots of different people suggest an endless amount of remedies and tricks to get the baby back to sleep. But now researchers say they’ve scientifically found the best way to put a newborn back in the crib, and that includes moving.
The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology, suggest that the best method is to hold a crying baby and walk with it for five minutes. After that, the researchers say, sit and hold for five to eight minutes before putting the baby to bed. The results show that the sitting-after walking method works even during the day.
The researchers came to this conclusion after comparing 21 infant responses in four scenarios, including being held by mothers walking, held by mothers sitting, lying in a cradle, and lying down with a rocking motion.
The team found that the crying babies calmed down and their heartbeats slowed within 30 seconds after the mother carried her on foot. It is reported that all babies stop crying during this exercise and half fall asleep. Their heart rate was also slowing as they lay in a rocking motion.
However, when mothers tried to put their babies back to bed after walking with them without sitting down with them, a third of the babies woke up again within 20 seconds. In addition, the babies, who were kept sitting without being carried while walking, had a faster heartbeat and continued to cry.
Additionally, when babies slept longer before being put back to bed, they were more likely to stay asleep.
A researcher and co-author at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan, Dr. “Even as a mother of four children, I was very surprised to see the result. I thought that the baby’s waking up from lying down had to do with how they were put to bed, such as their posture or the softness of their movements,” Kumi Kuroda said in a statement. “But our experiment did not support these general assumptions.”
The research supports the transport response that Kuroda and her team previously discovered in baby mammals, including humans, when they feel calm when carried by their mothers.
Although this method gives positive results, it is not the only way to put babies to sleep and it is a fact that it may not work for everyone. The American Academy of Pediatrics says parents can put their babies to sleep when they’re sleepy and not put them back to sleep when they wake up. Pregnancy, Birth and Baby (Pregnancy, Birth and Baby) from Australia also suggests many different ways to put babies back to bed.
The researchers say that about 20-30% of infants “cry profusely and exhibit sleep difficulties” for some unknown reason, and their goal is to provide an immediate solution for parents. The team also says that more research is needed to determine whether this method can improve sleep over the long term.
“Like science-based fitness education, with these advances we can do science-based parenting and hopefully help babies sleep and reduce parental stress caused by excessive baby crying,” Kuroda says. “We need science to understand a baby’s behavior because it’s much more complex than we thought. and diverse.”
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