This is something I'm delving into in my soon to be released baby sleep book. Using it after 4 months can create a sleep association. Certainly, after 6 months most babies cope very well without it. You're trying to get them to sleep at night, not have a party in their crib! The sounds most parents find effective are: the hairdryer, vacuum cleaner and the clothes tumble drier.Īt 3-12 months. Newborns absorb stimuli and the last thing you want is a highly aroused baby in the middle of the night. Use an App on your smartphone or a white noise machine but without a light show. They still use the iPod nightly, but Strong turns the volume down after her daughter falls asleep. “Sixty decibels is equivalent to a conversation, so I feel comfortable with that,” she says. At her daughter’s pillow, the sound measured in the 55 to the 60-decibel range. She downloaded a decibel-measuring app on her smartphone and checked the levels in the nursery. Strong, a mother from Ontario, Canada read about Papsin’s study, she says she felt like a terrible parent but decided to do her own research. “But they aren’t regulated at all, so just think about lowering the dose,” he explains. “I’m not saying you’re a bad parent if you use these machines,” says Papsin. Turn them down, or off, once a child has dozed off for the night. Papsin advises placing sound machines as far away from the crib as possible, on the lowest setting. There are so many opinions on parenting out there. Who is right? No wonder parents are confused nowadays. So what is a sleep deprived parent to do? What a quandary when doctors are in dispute. Karp says, 'there’s absolutely no evidence that more moderate sounds, around 65 to 70 decibels or the sound of a soft shower, are harmful'. Harvey Karp, author of 'The Happiest Baby on The Block', disputes these findings and recommendations. Papsin would like to see the noise reduced once baby is off to sleep. However he failed to say which of the white noise machines he had tested. However some pumped out levels of 85db, the level of a loud hairdryer. Pepsin and his colleagues did further research on 14 commercially available baby white noise machines and they were horrified by the results.Īll the machines were capable of reaching 50db the level considered to be safe in newborn nurseries. That’s a level that can be reached by a loud hair dryer. “Eighty-five decibels is what this thing was pumping out,” he says. The next time he went into the room, he brought a sound pressure meter. “The parents said, ‘Oh, the sleep doula tells us this is good for sleeping,’” Papsin recalls. Paediatric ear surgeon Blake Papsin at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto got interested in these white noise machines when he went into a patient’s room and was blasted with white noise. If you live near a busy road, over a flight path or have neighbours doing DIY then having background noise or white noise can be very helpful. By day 6 I’d had enough of the, ‘Sssshhhhh, Freya’s sleeping’, so the radio went on (not quiet but not loud) and we all were much happier! And yes Freya slept. I remember when my sister had her first baby and I stayed with her for a week. The first 3 months or as it is commonly known, the 4th trimester. So put that radio on low and talk normally. Also good settling habits encourage deeper sleep so noise has less of an impact on baby. If your house is too quiet and they hear a sudden loud noise such as DIY/house renovation noises that is more likely to startle more than the usual noise of family life. Having background noise is helpful and healthy for a young baby. Think how noisy hospitals and special care nurseries are, and yet these babies sleep soundly. At 3 months the ability to go into deeper sleep and join sleep cycles becomes more likely as your baby matures. They have high arousal states as a survival mechanism. So why did we start using it to get our babies to sleep? Nowadays they are in nearly every nursery and baby sleep space. It is a truly modern parenting phenomenon and something that I never came across being used 10 years ago and very rarely 5 years ago. Nearly every family I help with their baby's sleep has some version of white noise being used to help their baby sleep.
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