So I'm from Zambia and like in most black African cultures we carry our babies in swaddles across the back of the caregiver (like a backpack). [1]
I'm not exaggerating when I say that right this minute I can't think of a single occasion where I've ever seen a baby crying while being carried like this and most are fast asleep while the caregiver goes about their business.
When we had our kid we also carried her everywhere, it has been pretty popular in Sweden for a while. It helps a lot with being close but still the cause of the crying has to be investigated. After a long period of no proper sleep we finally figured out what the problem was. Baby was allergic to milk protein and was crying because of the pain it caused. Due to bad knowledge and advice we only tried ruling out milk allergy for a week but it takes many weeks for the milk protein to leave the mothers system. When we got baby formula without milk protein our baby could sleep without pain and the dry skin spots went away. I'm wondering if most problems with crying babies are from undiagnosed milk protein allergy. It usually disappears during the first seven years.
I carried all of my kids on the front. It puts me more at ease when I can keep an eye on them, and I'm sure I don't bump them into stuff inside the house. However, it makes it more difficult if you want to work, like for example wash the dishes.
"Even if the baby is asleep, they notice when they have been separated from their caregiver"
It seems they're born with proximity sensor. They'll start crying again once you're moving a feet away.
"most effective way to put a baby to sleep was to carry them and walk around for five minutes, sit and wait for five to eight minutes, then put them to bed"
This advice doesn't mention crying, does it mean we have to make it stop crying first?
Ideally - yes. In reality - I can walk my feet off and my 3 months y.o. daughter won't stop crying. Sometimes nothing but mommys tit helps (even if shes not hungry. A pacifier won't do either, no matter the model, if she needs her mom - she needs her mom)
Then you just walk with them, until they calm down. Do household things, ect. or actually take a short (or long) walk outside.
And maybe be conscious about your breathing when caring them, if you are stressed out(why is she not calming down!), they notice it and it does not calm them.
Did you try completely getting rid of milk protein for the mother? We tried this from advice from the nurse but they said for a week. It wasn't enough, it can take 3-4 weeks. Ask your nurse for help, there are other food you can give your baby while you wait for the milk protein to disappear from the mother. Milk protein allergy can be tested with blood tests too but is pretty invasive for a baby.
This is already known data, you simulate the conditions of the womb and a baby in the 4th trimester (we're born early because of our big heads), will sleep easily. So swaddling, swaying and shhhing all simulate being in the womb where you hear white noise, are tightly confined and gently rocked or swayed by the mother's natural movement as she walks around, etc.
Very tangentially related, an old trick that often works with small (dog) puppies crying at night when separated from their mother is to put them into their basket together with a (warm) hot water bottle and a mechanical alarm clock (those old ones that tick very loud) wrapped in a blanket.
In that case it is the combination of (fake) body warmth + (fake) heartbeat that makes them sleep, since we are mammals/animals too, the mechanism for babies is likely similar.
It's no extreme. It does work and there are also toys that generate white noise to help babies sleep. Also a lot of Spotify playlists dedicated to this.
They sell white noise and whale noise baby products, many parents started using their phones or Echo/Home devices. So yes, anything with a speaker will work, and is likely closer to what you hear in the womb then what one's mouth can simulate. It also still works on adults. I regularly have a fan or white noise going when I sleep.
Not an extreme. Pink noise works really well and brown noise to some extent. White noise is a bit harsh for our human ears.
The pink noise besides simulating the shushing also serves as sort of a noise blanket to make other sounds being made around the baby pop up less, sort of sound mantle.
We found swaddles with velcro to be really helpful for our kids to fall and stay asleep. We tried a few but the SwaddleMe's [1] worked the best. The baby would manage to work their arm out of the others we tried...and once their arm is out it is game over...their startle reflex wakes them up.
Once they outgrow the swaddle, the Merlin Magic Sleepsuits [2] were amazing. Bonus...you can't stop laughing at how silly they look while wearing them [3].
Bad advice.
Swaddling might stop your baby crying but it leads to a bunch of unwanted side effects:
- increased risk of sudden infant death
- delayed development of motor skills
- 4x increased risk of respiratory infections
- increased risk of dysplasia
When babies are swaddled they quickly notice that no amount of squealing or crying changes their situation.
Our four month old moves a lot when she gets tired. I carry her around and let her shift and stir in my arms until she calms down. I won't block any of her movements. I won't hold her tight, but allow her to move freely in any direction she wants. From the back, to the side, to the belly and back. She looks around the room until she gets tired. Moving around helps, because changing visual focus tires babies and makes them fall asleep faster.
It's sometimes inconvenient to carry her around for an hour or so, but eventually she falls asleep. I take these moments as an opportunity to bond with her.
Magic Merlin is awesome but it's for a pretty short duration and then you have to wean for sleep sacks right? That was my understanding at least, so we went right to a sleep sack and just bundled it with sleep training to avoid the extra step. But so many of our friends swear by the merlin.
+1 to some sort of "engineered swaddle" that restrains the arms effectively.
We found "traditional" swaddles to be unreliable - once the arm/arms were out then it is only a matter of time before they hit themselves in the face with their arms, but swaddles with specific features to prevent the escape of the arms to work really well.
We used one called Miracle Swaddle for both our kids. Just make sure you stop using swaddles as soon as the kid can roll on their own.
Also +1 to the Velcro swaddle. Swaddling with a regular piece of fabric is something I mastered in the hospital and then swiftly forgot as soon as we got home. The Velcro swaddle was a game changer.
We transitioned to sleeping bags with arms out as soon as our baby could roll over, and he's still using those now at 14 months.
> Just make sure you stop using swaddles as soon as the kid can roll on their own.
Good to call out for safety reasons. FYI - this is when we transitioned to the Merlin Sleepsuit which prevents them from turning over but does not fully restrain their arms.
I have identical twin sons. When they were newborns, to quiet them down I would carry one around the Trader Joe's directly across the street from our house, walking up and down the aisles (it was cold outside). Then I'd come back to do the same with the other one. It worked like a charm. The employees knew me well.
It wasn't until a few months later that we showed up at Trader Joe's with both of them in a stroller. Some employees later confessed that they didn't believe I had two kids until then.
"In the experiment, when their babies cried loudly, moms randomly combined four actions -- carrying them on a walk, sitting while holding them, putting them to bed, and rocking them in a stroller -- about every 30 seconds."
it's 2022 and they are still doing research with just moms as caregivers?
Upvote from me. As a dad of a 5 day old (and a 3 1/2 year old) any hints on how I can help sooth baby for even relatively short periods of time would be super helpful.
The problem is with a breastfed baby they are very focused on getting their milk supply where it needs to be and if that means feeding practically constantly for hours at a time, that's fine by them.
A throwaway troll account, great! But I'll bite. This has nothing to do with social justice but rather bad science due to the _fact_ that they eliminate 50% of the baby's caregivers in the research. What if the science showed that when the baby isn't hungry the baby stops crying sooner if being held close by the dad because the smell of tits leaking milk confuses them?
edit: Also, the sample size of just 21 babies gives away that this is bad science so...
I'm not sure it's a troll account, I could very well imagine that parent is afraid that in the current climate, their opinion could get downvoted to hell. But you could be right.
Well I said troll because of the trolling behaviour. Using inflammatory/divisive wording about "judgements about social justice" is not constructive to the debate and I am properly downvoted because I fed the troll. It doesn't make it better that acknowledged that I fed the troll.
also - none of the suggestions suggest to breastfeed a baby crying if she/he was already fed before. Therefore I don't the argument that this is something that must be done by mothers only.
Meanigless study with only 21 babies, extremely small sample size to make some general statements.
> Results showed that the most effective way to put a baby to sleep was to carry them and walk around for five minutes, sit and wait for five to eight minutes, then put them to bed.
Also this is nice theory, we all know of course if you hold baby (and eventually walk) the baby can fall asleep, the problem is to put the baby down without waking it up, I would like to see this quantified over hundreds of children how many times will baby wake up after following these steps and then putting them in bed.
1. It's an exploratory study which both confirms previous results and builds on them. Furthermore, a sample size of 21 is not too inherently small to draw conclusions - that would depend on the effect sizes between conditions...
2. The study is explicitly about whether or not the children stay asleep after the different proposed routines. This is one of the main points of the article and is directly addressed within:
"When an infant falls asleep in one’s arms or in a stroller, parents would then want to put the infant to bed. However, this laydown procedure often makes the infant alert again. In this study,
9 of 26 (34.6%) sleeping infants awoke by 20 s after the laydown,
while the remaining 17 infants stayed asleep. "
> Why comment with a critique if you didn't even have a cursory look at the paper, or even understand what the dependant variables are?
Because I am commenting on article posted on HN. No such information provided in linked article, nor is the study linked there.
> In this study, 9 of 26 (34.6%) sleeping infants awoke by 20 s after the laydown, while the remaining 17 infants stayed asleep.
Thanks for link to the study and thanks for proving me right with the quote. More than 1/3 of children waking up almost instantly within 20 seconds just confirms this is hardly usable and "best" way to put crying baby to sleep even with such small sample size. And if we had more data I'd expect most of the babies woke up shortly after that 20 seconds limit. I tried to look at the charts but they are difficult to read, since they don't provide normal table with times for all babies.
It's similar nonsense as road casualties, which are not comparable across countries since some countries count causalty as someone dying after car accident within 7 or 30 days and if you crash and lay in coma 31 days you are suddenly not road casualty anymore, same as here amusing 20 seconds threshold for success.
I'm getting quite depressed by the increase prevelence of these types of dismissive comments on studies. You see this exact argument posted especially on Reddit.
The second increasingly common popular comment is "Yeah but is it causal? and not correlation?", including popular follow ups such as did they correct for socio economic status? (Which in the vast majority of studies, they always do)
I'm curious to know if the posters of these comments have been to univsersity / college? Have they taken any classes on the basics of scientific method? I remember my bachelors had a course on it, at least.
It's great that more people are interested in science, but it's not great that people dismiss entire studies because they do not understand how science works.
I've found a little trick when my newborn cries or gets unsettled while sleeping.. whenever she makes a noise I just go over and pat her. it moves the gases around and she's settled instantly.
in order to put her asleep I usually just wheel her back and forwards in the pram, taking her over the edge of the rug (for the bump) usually stops her from crying.
When she was really little, I used to have to walk to get her asleep, or do squats while holding her to stop her from crying.
Most of the time, from all of my experiences and from what everyone's told me, they cry for only a few reasons: gas, love, hungry, nappy.
Yeah at the early stages the cries seem to just be gas, food, nappy, or attention.
We found that "la pause" is quite effective - let them fuss for up to a minute or so rather than rushing to the cot to intervene. A lot of the time they can work it out themselves without any help.
A trick my mom and dad used on me was taking me for a short drive in car. For some reason moving in a car/bus makes me sleepy. Even today I have no problem sleeping in a bus or plane even if I am not tired
> The team tested 21 pairs of babies aged 7 months or younger and their mothers. The subjects were drawn from a range of nationalities and races, including those from Japan and Italy.
Very little sample size and lack of control? I'm afraid this is another bad study.
> Results showed that the most effective way to put a baby to sleep was to carry them and walk around for five minutes, sit and wait for five to eight minutes, then put them to bed
ok cool, as a father i did already figured it out…
I found that the more you carry your child the less she cries. I was just carrying my child wherever I went with a strap around my front, which I found more practical than a buggy until she became too heavy.
I read a study that children that are carried all the time cry a substantial amount less than children that are not, something like half an hour less per day.
it's not about carrying, but proximity to mother/parents body with human warmth
obviously baby which is held/touched by another human, ideally mother/father will cry less than baby alone from adults even if it means 0.5-1 m distance
From our experience - and of course every baby is different - we found consistency is key. New borns need to nap like every hour and you as parents need to actively manage those naps to make sure they happen at the right time, and you do the same set of things each time so soon enough baby knows that when you do foo that sleep time is coming and they calm down. Foo could be singing or a special story or getting into a sleep sack or music or whatever. Then just into a normal cot and they slept soundly.
The other thing we found that was essential is a £10 gym/yoga ball to slowly bounce/jiggle on while holding them. Worked really well for us (as part of the routine).
Good luck. Perhaps as every baby is different you really need the 2k cot, good luck either way.
yeah, but breastfeeding works the best/easiest, which obviously ain't very suitable for men, my kids never used pacifiers (and pretty much never milk bottles), they just refused them
