Researchers have decided to come to the aid of parents frustrated by the crying of their baby who refuses to fall asleep and have carried out a revealing experiment: carrying infants in motion would be the key.
All parents have already had to deal with this situation which can sometimes turn into a nightmare: their baby does not stop crying and does not want to sleep. About 20-30% of newborns cry excessively and reveal difficulty falling asleep for no apparent reason, resulting in parental stress and even triggering impulsive child abuse in rare cases.
It is to help these families that researchers have carried out an experiment to determine which technique is the most effective for soothing a child. Better than wearing them while sitting or rocking them in bed, which calms infants best, it is to carry them in motion. A method to promote sleep and stop a child’s crying using the transport response. We explain to you.
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This is what Kumi Kuroda and his team, from the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan, highlighted in their scientific experiment published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology. Through a detailed study, the researchers analyzed four experimental conditions on 21 babies between zero and seven months: carrying the infant while walking, carrying him while sitting, lying him down in a bed, lying him down in a moving cradle.
Using an electrocardiogram, the scientists analyzed the heart rate of infants in different situations. Thus, they demonstrated that getting your baby moving lowered heart rate within 30 seconds but not when standing still. Moreover, after 5 minutes of walking, 45.5% of the children were asleep and no one was crying (even during the day when they are supposed to be awake).
Stop crying and put your baby to sleep
But once rested in bed, babies tended to wake up within 20 seconds for more than a third of them. And the way they were posed had no impact on this effect. The solution according to scientists: keep the child in his arms 5 to 8 minutes after the walk to prevent the child from waking up when laying in bed. This period more or less corresponds to the duration of the first phase of sleep, then still light. “We need science to understand a baby’s behaviors,” concludes Kumi Kuroda, “because they are much more diverse and complex than we thought.”