Exhausted parents rejoice! Scientists develop a ‘recipe’ to stop babies crying

From offering a pacifier to desperately singing lullabies, most exhausted parents will do whatever it takes to get their baby to stop crying.

Now a study claims to have the ‘recipe’ for rocking a baby to sleep — and it’s surprisingly easy.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan argue that the trick to calming a crying baby is to carry them in your arms for five minutes and then sit with them in your arms for five to eight minutes before you put them on. put in their bed.

“For many, we are intuitively older and listen to the advice of others about parenting without testing the methods with rigorous science,” said Kumi Kuroda, corresponding author of the study.

“But we need science to understand the behavior of babies because they are much more complex and diverse than we thought.”

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan claim that the trick to calming a crying baby is to hold them in your arms for five minutes and then sit them in your arms for five to eight minutes before placing them in their arms. bed

In the study, the researchers set out to find a solution to nighttime crying.

“Many parents are bothered by babies crying at night,” said Ms. Kuroda.

“That’s such a big problem, especially for inexperienced parents, that in a small number of cases it can lead to parental stress and even child abuse.”

Many altricial mammals — those born in an immature state and unable to fend for themselves — have an innate response to crying called the transport response.

For example, mice, dogs and monkeys will pick up their baby and start walking, making the baby sleepy.

The researchers theorized that the transport response may also help calm human babies.

To test whether this was the case, the team compared the responses of 21 crying babies under four conditions: held by their mother, held by their seated mother, lying in a quiet crib or lying in a crib bed.

Their observations showed that when the mother walked while carrying the baby, the crying baby calmed down and their heart rate slowed down within just 30 seconds.

A similar effect was observed when the child was placed in a rocking bed.

However, when the mother held the baby in a sitting position or placed the baby in a quiet crib, the baby did not calm down.

This suggests that carrying alone isn’t enough to calm a crying baby, and instead, movement is needed to trigger the transport response.

Many altricial mammals — those born in an immature state and unable to fend for themselves — have an innate response to crying called the transport response. For example, mice, dogs and monkeys will pick up their babies and start walking, making the baby sleepy (stock image)

In particular, the researchers found that the effect was most apparent when the holding and walking lasted five minutes, with all the babies stopping crying and half falling asleep.

However, when the mothers tried to put their babies to bed, more than a third woke up within 20 seconds.

Instead, the researchers suggest that mothers should continue to hold their babies before putting them down, even if they appear to be in a deep sleep.

“Even as a mother of four, I was very surprised to see the result. I thought that babies waking up while lying down has to do with how they are put on the bed, such as their posture or the softness of the movement,” says Ms. Kuroda.

“But our experiment did not support these general assumptions.”

Based on the findings, the researchers propose a three-step “recipe” to calm a crying baby:

1. Hold the crying baby and walk with him for five minutes

2. Sit down and hold the child for another five to eight minutes

3. Put them to bed

The team hopes the method will provide an immediate solution for crying babies, although they aren’t sure if it will improve sleep in the long term.