Discover the scientific technique to make a baby stop crying and sleep

It’s every parent’s nightmare—an exhausted baby who won’t stop crying when bedtime comes. Worse still: when baby finally falls asleep in your arms, but wakes up again and starts sobbing when placed in the crib.

The solution is a magic pair of numbers — five and eight — according to Japanese researchers who experimented with 21 mothers trying to put their children to sleep.

Here’s how it works: Walk your baby for at least five minutes without sudden movements, at which point your little one will be calm if not asleep, according to the study. Then, sit down and hold the baby for another eight minutes before making a gentle transfer from the crib.

Putting the baby to sleep without first sitting silently for a full eight minutes ended in disappointment, according to study co-author Kumi Kuroda, team leader at the social behavior unit at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Saitama, Japan. .

“While we didn’t predict it, the key parameter for successful deposition of sleeping babies was the (delayed) onset of sleep,” Kuroda said in a statement.

“I raised four children and performed these experiments, but even I couldn’t predict the main results of this study until the statistical data came out,” Kuroda added.

Timing guidelines may be helpful for some parents and caregivers, but they won’t necessarily work for everyone, said Atlanta pediatrician Jennifer Shu, medical editor-in-chief of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) parent website.

“Babies are different and (some) may not respond to this system,” said Shu, who was not involved in the study.

Parents and caregivers shouldn’t use this technique regularly if a baby is able to fall asleep on their own, added Shu, who is also a co-author of “Going Home With Your Newborn: From Birth to Reality.”

“The goal should be to ensure the baby sleeps well using this or other techniques and eventually encourage him to fall asleep on his own, both at the beginning of bedtime and throughout the night (when he wakes up),” Shu said in an email. mail.

research data

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology, examined the impact of four calming behaviors on infant crying.

Mothers were asked to carry their baby while walking, walk their baby in a stroller or “mobile crib”, hold their baby when seated, and finally, place them directly in a crib or crib. The researchers monitored the baby’s heartbeat and filmed each session to record and time the response.

Sitting and holding a crying baby didn’t work, according to the study — monitors showed the baby’s heart rate increased and the behavior continued. Not surprisingly, putting the crying baby directly into the crib didn’t work either.

Only the movement calmed the babies, the study found. Within five minutes, all babies carried by walking mothers had stopped crying, heart rate had slowed, and 46% of babies were asleep. Another 18% of babies fell asleep within minutes, the study found.

However, the five-minute walk resulted in sleep only for crying babies. “Surprisingly, this effect was absent when the babies were calm beforehand,” Kuroda said.

Scientists saw similar results when parents pushed babies in strollers, but the impacts weren’t as robust.

Now for the even harder part: putting babies to sleep without waking them up. A third of babies in the study woke up immediately after being laid down, no matter how gently.

But it wasn’t the touch of the bed on a baby’s body that woke them up, the study found. Instead, the monitors showed that the baby’s heart rate response spiked when the baby was separated from the mother’s body.

However, when the babies were held for another eight minutes, they entered a more stable sleep state — one that didn’t change when they were separated from their mother, the researchers found.

Why does transport work?

Human babies, like other mammals, respond to what’s called the “carriage response,” an innate reaction seen in species with babies that are too immature at birth to walk or care for themselves.

You see it in nature videos all the time: mother lions, tigers and other wild cats, as well as their domesticated cousins, carry their babies by the back of their necks.

As well as wild and domestic dogs, mice and rats. Great apes, monkeys and other primates carry their babies on their backs, where the little ones soothe and cling, as do skunks and giant anteaters.

Marsupials like kangaroos, koalas and kangaroos have specialized pouches to cradle their babies as they grow.

The answer seems instantaneous — as soon as the mother picks up the baby and starts moving, the baby is relatively docile and the heart rate slows, according to research done by Kuroda and her team.

Unfortunately, it seems that humans aren’t as lucky as other mammal mothers and have to carry their young longer to get the same response. There’s another thing that sets people apart – the need for human babies to learn to sleep on their own.

“Holding or rocking a baby completely to sleep creates a routine that the baby will learn to expect,” Shu said. “When the baby wakes up in the middle of the night in a light sleep stage (as we all do), he may require the routine to be performed again.”

For babies four months and older, the AAP recommends putting them to bed when they are sleepy, rather than waiting for them to fall asleep completely.

And don’t rush to soothe a baby over three months old when he wakes up, recommends the AAP. Just like adults, the baby can move and move and go back to sleep.

Be sure to follow safe sleep guidelines: You should always put babies to sleep on their backs for naps and at night, in an approved crib without bumpers, pillows, soft toys, quilts, comforters, or blankets.