Getting a crying baby back to sleep at nighttime is an often unavoidable task for exhausted parents, but scientists now say that they have found the most effective soothing method.
The researchers wanted to find a method that can help provide an immediate solution when a baby is crying, rather than some other popular sleep training approaches such as letting infants cry until they fall asleep themselves.
Parents should simply walk around while holding their baby for five minutes, according to the new study. It was found to be the most effective of the four conditions that were looked at which included a baby being held by their walking mothers, held by their sitting mothers, lying in a still crib, or lying in a rocking cot.
The team found that when the mother walked while carrying the baby, the crying infants calmed down and their heart rates slowed within 30 seconds.
The ideal approach, according to the study, involved walking around for five minutes while carrying a child, making sure to minimise abrupt movements, followed by around eight minutes of sitting while holding the baby before finally laying them down in the cot for sleep.
Corresponding author Kumi Kuroda of the Riken Center for Brain Science in Japan said: "Many parents suffer from babies' nighttime crying. That's such a big issue, especially for inexperienced parents, that can lead to parental stress and even to infant maltreatment in a small number of cases."
The researchers compared the responses of 21 babies and found that simply holding a baby alone might be insufficient in soothing crying infants. They say that this contradicts the traditional assumption that maternal holding reduces infant distress.
Not only was walking seen to be one of the more effective techniques, it was also noted that crying babies in the study stopped crying and nearly half of them fell asleep after walking continued for five minutes.
The effect was called the "transport response" and was found to exist in other animals that are helpless at birth – such as cats, dogs, mice and squirrels.
The researchers additionally found that if a baby was asleep for a longer period before being laid down, they were less likely to awaken during the process than a baby who was put to bed soon after falling asleep.
"Even as a mother of four, I was very surprised to see the result. I thought baby awoke during a laydown is related to how they're put on the bed, such as their posture, or the gentleness of the movement," Kuroda says. "But our experiment did not support these general assumptions."
While the experiment involved only mothers, Kuroda expects the effects are likely to be similar in any caregiver.
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