Holding And Walking Your Infant For 5 Minutes Is The Best Strategy For Soothing Crying Babies, New Study Finds
Both inexperienced and veteran parents alike have all suffered from the same experience: being unable to soothe their wailing baby after bedtime.
It can be extremely frustrating to hear the screams coming through your baby monitor night after night. Moreover, it can be nerve-wracking trying to soothe your infant and realizing that nothing works.
This universal experience prompted researchers from the RIKEN Center for Brain Science to figure out the best calm-down strategy that parents can add to their repertoire. And thankfully, their method is extremely simple.
Kumi Kuroda, one of the study’s corresponding authors, and her team began by studying the transport responses of numerous altricial mammals.
In other words, mammals that are too immature to care for themselves following birth, including dogs, mice, monkeys, and, of course, humans.
And interestingly, the researchers observed how when elders pick up their young and start walking to transport them, the bodies of their offspring typically become docile. Moreover, their heart rates slow.
So, the team hoped to compare the transport response effects of the various ways adult humans typically try to soothe their babies.
In turn, twenty-one infants’ responses were compared after being analyzed under four conditions. First, the babies were held by sitting mothers, then walking mothers. And finally, the babies laid in a still crib or a rocking cot.
And amazingly, the researchers found that infants who were held and walked by their mothers experienced slowed heart rates within just thirty seconds.
Alena Ozerova – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purpose only, not the actual person
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And even though similar calming effects were observed under the other three conditions, nothing compared to the level of calm babies underwent while being held and walked. In fact, every single baby stopped crying, and almost half of them fell asleep.
So, the team now believes that parents should hold and walk with their crying babies for about five minutes before sitting and holding their babies for another five to eight minutes. Finally, after that period, the infant can be put to bed.
Kudora, a mother herself, described her shock with these results. However, she underscored how research like this study is instrumental in improving parenting knowledge beyond shared techniques.
“For many, we intuitively parent and listen to other people’s advice on parenting without testing the methods with rigorous science. But we need science to understand a baby’s behaviors because they are much more complex and diverse than we thought,” Kudora said.
Still, the researchers hope to assess this strategy’s long-term effects since the study was only able to ascertain its effectiveness as an immediate solution for infant crying as opposed to other approaches, such as letting babies cry until they fall back to sleep.
To read the study’s complete findings, which have since been published in Current Biology, visit the link here.
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