New parents are often told the five S’s are the secret to newborn sleep: swaddle, side position, shush, swing, and suck. The term, coined by pediatrician Harvey Karp in his book The Happiest Baby on the Block, is also one of the first results on google when desperate parents search for “how to get my baby to sleep “ at 3 o’clock in the morning. One of the other results is the sleep class called “Taking Cara Babies” which, in the newborn class, also offers a series of tasks to complete in order to ensure your baby sleeps through the night.
However, new research just published in Current Biology gives new parents an even easier method to get their babies to sleep: walking with them. When a baby is crying too hard to calm down and get to sleep the research team, led by Nami Ohmura from the Laboratory for Affiliative Social Behavior at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Saitama, Japan, suggests walking with the infant for five minutes, then sitting down holding the baby for five to eight minutes, and then laying the baby in the crib.
Previous research by some members of the team found that infants like to be carried, especially by their mothers. The “swing” step in Karp’s five S’s also refers to carrying an infant. As such, the mother-infant bond which is developed during carrying is not a new phenomenon, but the timing is.
The current research team put heart rate monitors on 21 infants, from newborns (usually a baby three months old or younger) to babies seven-months-old. Additionally, video recordings were taken of the infants to monitor their mood. The researchers found that the babies’ heart rate slowed down and they tended to stop crying when their mothers picked them up and carried them around for five minutes. If a parent tried to put the baby down before the five-minute mark, the heart rate quickened. Moreover, if a parent then sat while holding the baby for five or more minutes, the baby tended to stay asleep once they were transitioned to their crib.
Unfortunately for new parents, the research team says that this is not a trick to get babies to sleep through the night. However, if and when a baby wakes up at night, this method could help babies get back to sleep faster.
Sources: Happiest Baby blog, Happiest Baby on the Block book, Taking Cara Babies, Current Biology 2022, Current Biology 2013, Science News
