Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — It’s every mother’s or father’s nightmare: an exhausted baby who doesn’t stop crying when it’s time for bed. Worse, he finally falls asleep in your arms and then wakes up and cries once more when put into his bed.
The solution is a magic pair of numbers, five and eight, according to Japanese researchers who conducted experiments with 21 mothers trying to calm their young children to sleep.
Here’s how to do it: Walk your child for a minimum of five minutes without making sudden movements, by that time the child will have calmed down, or fallen asleep, according to the study. Then sit and hold the baby for another 8 minutes before gently placing him in his crib.
Putting a sleeping infant to bed without first sitting quietly for a full eight minutes can be frustrating, said study co-author Dr.
“Although we did not expect this, the main factor in the infant’s successful surrender to sleep is being late for bedtime,” Kuroda said in a statement.
“I raised four children and conducted these experiments, but even so, I might not anticipate the main results of this study until the statistical data came out,” Kuroda added.
Dr. Jennifer Shaw, a pediatrician in Atlanta and medical editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ parenting website, said timing guidelines may be helpful for some parents and caregivers, but they don’t necessarily apply to everyone.
“Children are different, and some of them may not respond to this regimen,” said Shaw, who was not involved in the study.
Shaw, co-author of Going Home with Your Newborn: From Birth to Reality, added that parents and caregivers should not use this technique regularly if the baby can sleep alone.
“The goal is to make sure that the child sleeps well with these or other techniques, while making sure to encourage them to fall asleep on their own at the end, either at bedtime or during the night when they wake up,” Shaw told CNN.
Heart rate data key
The study, published in the journal Current Biology on Tuesday, examined the effect of four calming behaviors on crying babies. Mothers were asked to hold their infant while walking, walk their infants in a stroller or ‘carrying bed’, hold their child while sitting, and finally put their child directly into his crib. The researchers monitored the child’s heartbeat and videotaped each session to record the response and its timing.
According to the study, sitting and holding your baby crying does not lead to any result. Monitors have shown that the baby’s heart rate rises, and this behavior continues. Not surprisingly, putting a crying baby straight into his crib didn’t work either.
The study found that only movement calmed children. Within five minutes, all the babies carried by their mothers stopped crying, their heart rates slowed, and 46% of the babies slept. The study indicated that an additional 18% of the children fell asleep within a few more minutes.
The researchers saw similar results when mothers pushed their babies into strollers, but the effects were not strong.
As for the hardest part related to putting children to sleep without waking them up, the results showed that two-thirds of the children in the study woke up immediately following being placed in a lying position, despite their gentle position. The study found that the touch of the bed on the child’s body did not cause him to wake up, but the monitors showed that the response of the child’s heart rate increased when the infant was separated from the mother’s body for the first time.
Therefore, the researchers saw that when the babies were kept for an additional eight minutes, they fell into a more stable sleep state, and their heart rates did not increase when they were separated from their mother.
Is it beneficial to carry a baby?
Like other mammals, babies respond to what’s known as the “transfer response,” an innate reaction seen in species whose babies are too immature at birth to walk or take care of themselves.
The response seems immediate, and once the mother picks up the baby and starts moving, the baby is relatively calmer and his heart rate slows, according to research by Kuroda and her team.
But humans are just as unlucky as other mammalian mothers, and need to carry their young for a longer period to get the same response.
“Holding or rocking the whole baby to put him to sleep creates a routine that the baby learns to expect,” Shaw said. And she continued, “When the child wakes up in the middle of the night in the stage of light sleep, like us, he may need to resume the routine once more.”
For babies 4 months of age and older, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends putting them to bed when they are sleepy rather than waiting for them to fall asleep completely.
The academy recommended the importance of not rushing to calm a child over 3 months old when he wakes up, just like adults, as the child may turn a lot and then go back to sleep.