Parents will do anything to get a baby to sleep, but experts warn against the popular trend of using “white noise.”
The noise sounds similar to static on a TV or radio, and whether it comes from a machine or a phone app, it has become hugely popular – up to a third of parents use some form of background noise to help their babies sleep.
Sleep professionals and parenting influencers have claimed that a consistent background sound helps the brain focus less on sudden, disruptive noises that could disrupt concentration or wake them up.
But recently, experts are realizing that white noise and other pink or brown noises may do more harm than good when it comes to children’s language development.
It could even lead to a “public health problem,” according to Dr. April Benasich, a world-renowned sleep expert at Rutgers University.
Dr. April Benasich’s work with babies raises concerns about the effect white noise might have on their language development.
TO survey According to The Sleep Doctor, 37 percent of parents said their children needed some form of background noise to help them fall asleep. The most popular method (45 percent) was white noise.
Dr Benasich, who is also director of the Rutgers Childhood Studies Laboratory, told DailyMail.com that the use of sound in babies can alter the formation of their language skills, which begins even before they are born.
The monotonous tone of white noise can interfere with a child’s “acoustic mapping,” the brain network that helps babies understand and learn language.
Babies’ brains constantly interpret every sound to establish linguistic networks and assimilate which sounds are repeated to determine what is important to hear and develop their native language.
A baby’s brain can differentiate variations in sounds that occur in a tenth of a millisecond, which helps the brain focus on the smallest unit of language and promotes brain connections to process sounds.
Dr Benasich, who has worked with 5,000 families in her lab, told DailyMail.com: ‘(The brain) is not sure what it’s going to hear, but it is hearing the sounds acoustically.
‘Young babies can hear the differences between every sound in the world… sounds that are tiny changes.’
While hearing these acoustic variations is important while a child is awake, it is especially vital when babies are asleep, Dr. Benasich said, because that is when most of the brain’s neuroplasticity (the ability to evolve and adapt by creating new neurons and networks) occurs.
But if parents use white noise, babies, who sleep between 12 and 18 hours a day, are exposed to it for hours on end.
And because it has zero variations, Dr. Benasich said, “you’re telling the brain that it doesn’t need to hear this because nothing’s happening,” and therefore the brain isn’t networking and missing crucial time to establish language skills.
Gabriella, a 35-year-old from New Jersey, used white noise with her first child and started using it with her second until her pediatrician recommended she switch to something with variation. Now, her youngest child falls asleep (and stays asleep) to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
She told DailyMail.com: “It drives us a bit crazy listening to that song over and over all night, but it’s better for him to hear that than white noise.”
Dr. Benasich told this website she wasn’t “a big social media person,” but a few years ago she started seeing influencers and parents posting about white noise.
She said: “When I heard that all the parents were using white noise… I thought, Oh my God. What are people doing to their children? I think it’s going to be a public health issue.”
Babies need to be exposed to variations in noise to help their language development, Dr April Benasich told DailyMail.com
Dr. Benasich and her team began engaging with sleep influencers and consultants and found that they had been taught about the benefits of white noise or seen articles promoting the sound, but hadn’t actually read any studies (which were poorly conducted and came to meaningless conclusions).
She thought, “My God, where do people get this information?”
However, when Dr. Benasich tried to raise awareness about the issue, she was met with criticism: “The reaction was incredible. We were like, ‘Why are people so crazy about this?'”
“They’re so involved that they don’t want to listen to the science. There’s no evidence that you’ve particularly harmed your child. We would say there’s no strong evidence that this is going to cause any lasting problems, but we don’t know.”
White noise can come from a phone app or a sound machine (stock photo)
Sarah, a 37-year-old mother from New York, told this website that she had been using white noise for her baby until a friend told her about the dangers.
“I changed the sound on his machine right then and there from my phone while he was napping,” the mother said.
Dr. Benasich, who created her own neuroscience-backed sound machine called Smarter sleeprecommends soundscapes with any kind of variation, even small ones, like ocean waves or heartbeats.
She told DailyMail.com: ‘You want every child to be able to have the advantage of having everything they can to support them… It’s just that parents don’t really understand what’s going on when the brain is setting up and that’s sad because we should have gotten that message across a long time ago.
“There is some information available, but people don’t understand how important the acoustic environment is.”
Dr. Benasich also said it is difficult to educate families because they can’t actually see the changes that are happening.
She told this website: ‘They can’t see that their (child’s) brain is changing or that the trajectory is better, but we know it is because we have seen it.’
And while she often encounters parents who say, “Well, I used white noise with all of my kids and they’re all fine and their vocabulary is really good,” she asks them, “But how much harder did you make the brain work to compensate[for using white noise]?”