One of the biggest frustrations for parents is when their babies start crying and they can’t be soothed or put to sleep. Now, a Japanese study has found the technique that could save this bad moment, and that is that by following a few simple steps your baby could stop crying and fall asleep in just 10 minutes.
What science says, specifically research carried out by members of the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan, is that the key would be to hold the baby in your arms and walk with them for five minutes until they fall asleep, then you should sit in a chair between five and eight minutes, so that rest takes hold, and finally, move on to a crib.
The study, which has been published in the journal Current Biology, involved 21 infants between 2 weeks and 7 months of age who were in four different situations when they cried: held by their mothers while they were walking, while they were sitting, when they were in a still cradle and in another rocking chair. The little ones had their heart rate measured by electrocardiogram to see how these four situations affected their crying.
5 minutes of walking and between 5 and 8 minutes in a chair
The researchers observed that when the mothers walked with the baby held, the baby stopped crying and its heart rate decreased within 30 seconds. Something similar happened when they were placed in a rocking cradle. However, the results were not good when the mother was sitting or the crib was immobile.
All the crying babies who were picked up and walked for five minutes stopped crying and almost half, 46%, fell asleep, 18% fell asleep one minute after starting to walk. At that point, the next step was passed, which was to put the babies asleep in the crib, at which point, more than a third woke up within a period of 20 seconds.
46% of children who were carried while crying stopped crying and fell asleep within 5 minutes, 18% did so within the first minute
The authors concluded that all babies produced physiological responses, such as changes in heart rate, that cause them to wake up at the moment their bodies separate from their mothers. This risk of wakefulness was reduced the more time they spent asleep in the arms before moving them to the crib.
“Even as a mother of four children, I was very surprised to see the result. I thought that the baby’s awakening during a bedtime is related to the way they are positioned in bed, like their posture or the smoothness of the movement. But our experiment did not support these general assumptions”, explained Kumi Kuroda, lead author of the research.
However, the study has certain limitations, the first is that it was done in a small group of babies while they cried and also, the tests were only done with their mothers, so it is not known if the effects with the fathers or other caregivers they would be the same.
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