The solution is a magic couple According to Japanese researchers who conducted experiments with 21 mothers trying to lull their babies to sleep.
Here’s how it works: Walk your baby around for at least five minutes without making any sudden movements, and if the little one doesn’t fall asleep, research shows they’ll calm down. Then sit and hold the baby for another eight minutes before transferring to a soft crib.
One of the authors of the study, Dr. Kumi Kuroda, Group Leader, Social Behavior Division, RIKEN Brain Science Center, Saitama, Japan.
“Although we didn’t predict it, the key parameter for successful sleep in sleeping infants was[latency]from sleep onset,” Kuroda said.
“I have raised four children and carried out these experiments, but I could not have foreseen the main results of this study until the statistics came out,” added Kuroda.
“Babies are different and (some) may not all respond to this system,” said Shu, who was not involved in the study.
“The goal should be to get the baby to get a good night’s sleep using one method or another, to encourage them to fall asleep on their own both at bedtime and throughout the night (when they wake up),” Shu said. in the email.
heartbeat data key
According to the study, sitting and holding a crying baby didn’t work—monitors showed the baby’s heart rate was rising and behavior continued. Not surprisingly, putting the crying baby directly into the crib didn’t work either.
As a result of the research, it was found that only movement calmed the babies. All within five minutes babies carried by walking mothers had stopped crying, their heart rates had slowed, and 46% of babies were asleep. According to the results of the study, an additional 18% of the babies fell asleep within minutes.
But the five-minute walk only resulted in sleep for crying babies. “Surprisingly, this effect was absent when the infants were pre-sedated,” Kuroda said.
Researchers saw similar results when parents pushed babies in strollers, but the effects weren’t as strong.
Now on to the more difficult part: putting down sleeping babies without waking them. A third of the babies in the study woke up immediately after being put down, no matter how gently. However, as a result of the investigation, it was found that it was not the bed touching the baby’s body that woke them up. Instead, the monitors showed an increase in the baby’s heart rate response when the baby was first separated from the mother’s body.
The researchers found that when the babies were held for an extra eight minutes, they entered a more stable state of sleep — they didn’t falter when separated from their mothers.
Why does porting work?
Human infants, like other mammals, respond to the so-called “transportation response,” an innate response seen in infants who are too immature to walk or care for themselves at birth.
You see it all the time in nature videos: Mother lions, tigers and other wild cats, as well as their domesticated cousins, carry their babies by the neck. Wild and domestic dogs, mice and rats too. Great apes, monkeys and other primates carry their babies on their backs, where the babies calm down and cling, as do opossums and giant anteaters. Marsupials such as kangaroos, koalas and wallabies all have special pouches to hold their babies as they grow.
Unfortunately, it seems that humans are not as lucky as other mammalian mothers and have to carry their young for longer to get the same response. There is another thing that makes people different — the need for human babies to learn to sleep on their own.
“Holding or rocking a baby to sleep completely creates a routine that the baby will learn to expect,” says Shu. “When a baby wakes up in the middle of the night in a light sleep phase (as we all do), they may require a re-run of the routine.”
The AAP recommends that babies older than 3 months should not be too quick to soothe when they wake up. Like adults, a baby moves a lot and can be restless and fall back asleep.
