Babies cry too much and refuse to sleep, making parents frustrated. According to scientists, the best way to calm them down is to hold and walk with them for five minutes. The paper is in the journal Current Biology.
According to Kumi Kuroda of the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan, a lot of parents suffer from babies crying at night. She says that it can lead to parental stress and infant maltreatment in a small number of cases.
The transport response is an innate reaction seen in many altricial mammals, such as mice, dogs, and humans. When these animals pick up their babies and start walking, the bodies of their young tend to become less active and their heart rates slow. Kuroda's team wanted to compare the effects of the transport response, the relaxed reaction while being carried, with other conditions such as motionless maternal holding or rocking, to see if the effects persist with longer carrying.
The responses of 21 infants were compared under four different conditions: being held by their walking mothers, held by their sitting mothers, lying in a still crib, or lying in a rocking cot. The crying infants slowed their heart rates after the mother walked while carrying the baby. There was a calming effect when the babies were placed in a rocking cot, but not when the mother held the baby while sitting or placing the baby in a crib.
This suggests that holding a baby alone may not be enough to soothe crying infants. The baby's transport response is likely activated by movement. When the motions continued for five minutes, the effect was more obvious. Half of the babies in the study fell asleep.
More than one-third of the participants became alert again within 20 seconds when the mothers tried to put their babies to bed. The team found that when a baby's body detaches from its mother, the baby's heart rate can go up and it can wake them up. The team found that if the infants were sleeping for a longer period before being laid down, they were less likely to wake up.
I was surprised to see the result. The baby's posture and movement are related to how they are put on the bed. Our experiment didn't support these assumptions. The effects are likely to be the same in any caregivers.
A method for soothing and promoting sleep in crying infants is proposed by the team. They suggest that parents hold crying infants and walk with them for five minutes, then sit and hold them for another five to eight minutes before putting them to bed. The protocol aims to provide an immediate solution for infant crying by letting them cry until they fall asleep. It's not certain whether it can improve infant sleep in the long term.
We don't test the methods with rigorous science for many reasons. The behaviors of a baby are more complex and diverse than we thought.
The Japan Society for the promotion of science supported the research.
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