How to put a crying baby to sleep? Scientists claim to have found an unstoppable method – Archyde

It is the anguish of all young parents and an eternal intergenerational debate. What is the best way to put a crying baby to sleep? A team of scientists from the “Kiren center for brain science” in Japan said Tuesday in the journal Current Biology to have found the formula to “provide an immediate solution to infant crying”. “This is an important question, especially for parents inexperienced and which can lead to parental stress and, to a lesser extent, to abuse”, explains the author of the study Kumi Kuroda straight away. While many parents put their baby directly back in his bed after having cradled on the spot, Professor Kuroda’s team advises them to walk for five minutes with the crying child, then to sit for another five to eight minutes, still holding the child before putting him back in his crib. The protocol is based on the “carrying response” of the children. To obtain this result, the team studied the behavior of about twenty children carried by their mothers, but estimates that the effects should be the same with “n matter what a parent.” The Japanese scientist explains that walking with the baby activates the infant’s “carrying response,” an innate response seen in many altricial mammals – those whose young are immature and unable to care for them. themselves – such as mice, dogs, monkeys and humans. When these animals pick up their young and begin to walk, the baby tends to become docile and their heart rate slows. This finding deconstructs a number of common misconceptions such as the idea that babies should be left to cry. But if just rocking a baby while walking calms the child – all babies studied stopped crying and almost half of them fell asleep in their mother’s arms – putting it back directly into bed resulted in a third of infants crying again within 20 seconds.HeartbeatJapanese scientists explain that when moved, babies automatically match their heart rate to that of the cradling parent. But the change in heart rate, the moment their body detaches from their mother, can wake them up instantly. That’s why Professor Kuroda’s team advise parents to sit down for five minutes before putting them in their crib. “As a mother of four children, I was very surprised to see the result. I thought baby woke up or not depending on how he was laid in the bed,” says Kumi Kuroda. “But our experience shows that this is not related to the gentleness of the gesture of the parent or the position of the infant. “We intuitively listen to other people’s advice on parenting without testing scientific methods. But we need science to understand the behaviors of babies, because they are much more complex than we thought, ”concludes the author of the study. Parents are free to test this new Japanese method which, if it does not work, will at least have the merit of making them practice daily physical activity.