By Cara Murez HealthDay Reporter
health day reporter
WEDNESDAY, Sept. 14, 2022 (HealthDay News) — A new study is giving parents what seems like a miraculous gift: a simple, free technique that takes just 13 minutes to put crying babies to sleep.
Researchers in Japan found that walking around while carrying babies for five minutes calmed newborns, while another eight minutes spent sitting while holding sleeping babies made the transfer to a crib smoother.
The team studied the calming process using a baby ECG machine and video cameras to compare changes in heart rate and behavior when 21 mothers performed some common activities to calm infants. These included carrying the babies, pushing them in a stroller and holding them in a seated position.
The researchers were able to record detailed data on babies who were crying, awake and calm, or sleeping. The idea was to track changes in behavior and physiology with great precision.
The team found that “walking for five minutes promoted sleep, but only for crying infants. Surprisingly, this effect was absent when babies were already calm beforehand,” said the study’s author, the Dr Kumi Kuroda, from the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Saitama, Japan.
Regardless, all of the babies in the study had stopped crying by the end of the five-minute walk and had a reduced heart rate. About half were asleep.
The study found that the babies were extremely sensitive to all of their mother’s movements, with their heart rates changing when their mother stopped walking or rolled over. The most significant event that disturbed sleeping infants happened just as they separated from their mother, highlighting the problem of having a sleeping baby who wakes up just as the baby is in bed .
“Although we did not predict it, the key parameter for successful lengthening of sleeping infants was latency from sleep onset,” Kuroda said in a RIKEN press release.
Specifically, babies often woke up if they were put to bed before they had about eight minutes of sleep.
To fix the problem, Kuroda suggests mothers carry a crying baby regularly for about five minutes with a few jerks, followed by about eight minutes of sitting before laying them down to sleep.
Continued
The study doesn’t explain why some babies cry excessively and can’t sleep, but it does offer a solution that can help parents.
Additionally, “we are developing a wearable ‘baby-tech’ device with which parents can view their babies’ physiological states on their smartphones in real time,” Kuroda said. “Like science-based physical training, we can do science-based parenting with these advances and hopefully help babies sleep and reduce parenting stress caused by excessive infant crying.”
The results were published Sept. 13 in Current Biology.
More information
The American Academy of Pediatrics has more on how to calm a crying baby.
SOURCE: RIKEN Center for Brain Science, press release, September 13, 2022