If you’ve ever been around a screaming baby, you’ll attempt lots of things to get it to calm down from feeding it, to holding it, to attempting to distract it, to ignoring it (or at least attempting to ignore it).
Well, Scientific American has just published a study that gives us the answer which comes from observing other species. For example, when a mother fox picks up the baby fox, the baby will go quiet very quickly. Scientists even have a name for this. It’s called the transport response and it appears to be a survival mechanism and shows up in mammals such as mice, monkeys and lions, too.
Keeping the baby quiet can become a matter of life or death for the mother and the baby. By the baby staying silent and not moving around while the mother is walking while holding the baby when danger is near.
Human parents have probably figured out the first part that picking the baby up and walking around will calm it down and the baby will go to sleep. However, when the parent puts the baby down, it starts screaming again.
The up/down cycle has begun.
So…here’s what the researchers discovered the parent needs to do to break this cycle. After the baby has fallen asleep, the parent needs to sit still for 5 to 8 minutes and only then easy the baby into the bassinet and viola…a sleeping baby and the Sounds of Silence!
(Reported The Week, March 24, 2023)
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