Video recordings and baby heart monitors were used to rank four different approaches that the research team employed.
It’s not a magic solution for sleep-deprived parents, but scientists say they found the best way to soothe a crying baby.
A series of experiments were conducted to find the most effective way to settle wailing infants.
Video recordings and baby heart monitors were used to rank the four different approaches the research team employed.
These were to hold the baby while seated, put them in a cot, hold them while walking, or use a pushchair or something similar to rock them.
The crying was reduced only when the babies were in motion, either from being rocked or carried around. Using the cot or sitting still with the baby did nothing to stop the crying.
The team wrote in the journal Current Biology that based on what they found, it is recommended parents pick up their crying baby and walk with them for five minutes without sudden direction changes or abrupt stops. Then they say to sit down and hold them for five to eight minutes before laying them down again.
After the initial five minutes of being carried around, the study saw that half of them fall asleep and all of them stopped crying. But a third of the babies woke up again almost immediately after being put back to bed, necessitating the additional five to eight minutes of sitting down and holding the baby.
The heart monitor data showed the heart rates of the babies sometimes went up enough to wake them when the parent broke physical contact. Sitting with the sleeping baby for a few minutes after walking with them helped to put them in a deeper sleep.
“Excessive crying, especially during the night-time, is shown to be a major source of parental stress,” said Dr Kumi Kuroda, of the Riken Center for Brain Science in Saitama, Japan.
“This roughly 15-minute method is worth trying before they start seriously worrying about what’s wrong with the baby.”
This was the approach that worked best but the results from the “exploratory” research on 21 babies in Japan and Italy need more checking with larger studies.
Gianluca Esposito, a professor of developmental psychology and co-author on the paper, said this method is not guaranteed to work every time a child is crying.
“Babies can have sleepless nights for very different reasons,” he said.
“If the baby has a stomach ache, I don’t think this will do much. Unfortunately, I think many parents will still have sleepless nights. That’s part of being a parent.”
