Eleven years ago my eldest son was born, who are the same as I read a book in which they advised that, when we could not sleep, we would test with the noise of a dryer, the kitchen extractor or a television channel not tuned This noise is called White noise, and although it seems a lie, many babies stop crying when they hear it.
Years later, the recommendation to stop using it began to run because it was said that babies, upon hearing it, stopped receiving stimuli and his brain was in a blocking situation; an alert situation that left them waiting to know what would happen next, stop crying because they were scared, and could affect their development.
Well, that is precisely what we are going to talk about today, trying to answer the question of the title: Is it safe to use white noise to calm and sleep the baby?
What is white noise and why does it work?
He White noise It has the peculiarity of being a sound in which all frequencies are at the same volume, without overhanging any over the other. This means that when listening to it at a sufficient volume, the rest of the surrounding sounds are annulled, and the person is left in a kind of sound isolation situation, hearing only the white noise.
In Babies and more Seven ways to calm your baby's cryWhen a baby who is crying hears it, he slowly stops crying, calms down, and in some cases he even falls asleep (especially if he cries because he wants to sleep and does not find a way to finish falling asleep).
Now, why this happens is not clear at all. In the first investigations in this regard, about 30 years ago, the similarity between white noise and the sound that a baby can hear in the womb; over time it was said no, that sound isolation simply occurs and that the baby, in the absence of stimuli, relaxes. And finally it was said that it was the same, but that the baby actually gets scared, stays on alert, in suspense, and that same stress causes him to end up falling asleep without being able to withstand that tension.
I have recommended it myself and then I have recommended avoiding it
As a nurse and father, I must confess that I used it more than once, at least with the elder. Without finding a way to calm him down definitively, prisoner of a spiral of crying that did not know how to calm down, I turned on the kitchen extractor on more than one occasion to see if he could do it, and on more than one occasion it worked, producing silence and getting to sleep.
But then I received an article from a magazine (it was not a scientific study), which I have not been able to find, that said what I tell in the second paragraph: it is better not to use it, it is dangerous, may cause developmental problems in babies.
Sure, reading something like that, what are you doing? Well, stop recommending it and tell mothers and fathers that although it seems to work, it is better not to do so for those reasons.
A recurring question ...
Just yesterday I saw a debate on Facebook between mothers, asking about the white noise, and they were more or less like me until now: some had tried or used it with their children and had no feeling that it was bad, and others had read somewhere (and they weren't able to find it) that it wasn't good.
Now it has been a while since I read that article and simply because of that, because it has been a while, and for responsibility when giving recommendations, I thought that before responding I should check if there are studies that defend one theory or another, so that parents have the information and act accordingly.
In Babies and more How to calm baby's cryWhat does the scientific evidence say
To talk about what science says about it I am going to talk about the studies that have been published more recently, because they are the ones that attract the most attention by not mentioning the possibility of generating stress in the baby:
In a study published in June 2017, they decided to compare two strategies to help calm the baby's colic: to rock them or make use of white noise until they fell asleep. To do this they took 40 1-month-old babies who had episodes of inconsolable crying and saw the group of children who were calmed with white noise they ended up crying less hours for the day Y sleeping longer at night. In the conclusions they said, simply, that white noise works better than balancing, and that it can be used with that intention.
Another study published in December 2016 made use of the White noise as a distraction to decrease the pain of babies during vaccination. With 75 premature babies as a sample, they made two groups, in which one heard white noise one minute before vaccination, up to one minute after it; In the other group the babies were vaccinated the same, but without white noise. They saw that, by quantifying pain, the 2,9% of the children of the white noise group had severe pain, for 82.5% in the control group; and that 67.6% of the white noise group had moderate pain, by 17.5% in the control group. They concluded that soft noise is a good strategy, and suggested that it is an interesting research path to know how it works and in what cases it can be used.
In another study of December 2014, three strategies were tested during a painful procedure: that the mother had the baby in her arms, that the mother had the baby in her arms and white noise was heard, and that the baby was in the crib and heard White noise. They saw that the babies who cried the least, and were the least disturbed, were those of the last group: those who were in the crib and heard white noise while the painful intervention was taking place, followed by those who were in arms and heard white noise, and finally those who were in arms without hearing the white noise.
So, are they scared?
You may be thinking the following: "If a baby cries less is in a cradle with white noise, it will be that white noise actually stresses them, scares them, and so they do not react."
Well, it's a possibility that I won't deny, but I have not been able to find evidence to support this claim, so continuing with the studies I have reached one of the oldest, in January 1990, when it was believed that babies calmed down because the noise resembled what they heard in the womb. In this study with 40 babies from 2 to 7 days old, two groups of 20 were made, and while those in one group were given white noise to see how long it took to fall asleep, those in the other group were left in the Cot without doing anything.
80% of children in the first group they had already fallen asleep after the first 5 minutes, while only 25% of the other group had done so in this period of time. In addition, by monitoring the infants' pulse, they saw that at the time of exposure to white noise the heart rate did not increase as expected if there was a stress response, but it decreased (the vertical lines are minutes and the arrow marks the moment when the white noise comes on):
That is, we know that intense noises scare them, makes them secrete cortisol (stress hormone), increases their heart rate and puts them on alert; but white noise does not seem to produce that effect because children get carried away by that noise, close their eyes, heart rate decreases and fall asleep. It has even been used in NICUs (Neonatal Intensive Care Units) because it helps to mask the noise of pumps, bells and machines, getting babies they wake up less times and sleep more hours.
Rats did not help them develop properly
And that's why many people started saying it was dangerous. Some studies with rats and white noise have shown that there is a worse brain development when rats are subjected to this sound. The most recent one is from January 2017 and in it they observed that an exposure of two hours a day of white noise causes the neuronal density of the medial geniculate body to decrease, which in Christian means that affects how rats orient their attention to hear different external stimuli.
And so?
Well, I don't know if you have reached any conclusion with everything mentioned, but just in case and in the absence of conclusive scientific evidence, the answer is no, I give you mine, trying to apply the common sense that I still have left (which is not much).
We know that white noise masks the sounds of the environment and leaves the baby in a situation of lack of auditory stimuli. This, which many people say is bad, does not seem to be so in view of the behavior of babies and their pulse: the baby relaxes and falls asleep (My logic tells me that when a baby is stressed he does not sleep, but does the opposite: cry, and cry more and more).
Now, the fact that you leave the baby without stimuli can affect your ability to hear, hear and learn from the environment through your hearing, because during the time you are immersed in white noise, he doesn't hear anything else. A baby exposed to soft noise too many hours a day would probably have serious problems understanding noises, sounds, etc., because we would be doing it "artificially deaf."
In Babies and more An investigation shows why the crying baby should always be taken care ofBut we also know that some adults who have trouble concentrating use it, precisely to abstract from everything else and be able to study or work without interruptions, and that some studies claim that it improves learning and helps to learn more words.
The use of white noise is also recommended in hospital plants of heart patients, because they manage to have a more peaceful and restful sleep.
That is, we know that it has the power to "tame the beasts", as if it were a relaxing music (in fact, it is said that the noise of water running in a stream is a kind of white noise).
And we know that the parents who have used it, we have done it as a last resort, when we have the baby crying and we are already the two desperate, the baby and us.
Knowing all this, that white noise is not eminently good, nor eminently bad, between having a baby crying in your arms, and consequently stressed, without auditory stimuli because you only hear yourself crying, and a calm baby to listen A few minutes white noise, I vote for the second without a doubt.
Different is that we use it without crying in between
Although many babies could sleep alone in a crib with white noise, perhaps after crying, the ideal is to go to the root of the problem. If a baby is just crying, what he asks is not white noise; He is asking for food or safety in the form of arms and affection, or both (falling asleep to the tit as most breastfed babies do since the beginning of time). That is what most mothers and fathers do and that is usually enough for them to fall asleep. I mean first you have to take care of the child based on what you need (Eating ice cream can make me forget that I have problems, but the problems are still there and so many ice creams will destroy my health).
If we already do it and still cries because he is sleepy but cannot fall asleep, because he is upset about something, because he has what seems to be colic and / or because he is tired of his shortness but too strange life, because between crying for half an hour or an hour, sometimes even more, and the white noise, I would go head to head for the second. Because you don't have any more solutions and because, I repeat, you're not putting it on a baby to eliminate environmental noise, but to eliminate his own crying from his ear.
It would be different if the quiet child turned it on to make him fall asleep; or that being in his nap we would turn it on so he wouldn't hear us talk, pick up the dishes, watch TV, etc .; or even that in the stillness of the night, we put it on so they would not "hear the silence" (yes, many babies wake up at night because they prefer to have some noise - silence is very strange in nature-). Then yes we would be stealing real stimuli from their surroundings without need, and we could affect the aforementioned neuronal development of the areas of listening and attention to auditory stimuli, and we would be harming it.
The information about white noise in your hands ...
So with the data I have provided and my conclusions, each mother and father can consider what is better and act accordingly. I only wish you never to see yourself in the position to use it, because that will mean that your baby does not reach that strange point in which even though you give everything you have, including your energy and your dream, cries.
And if you arrive, then just add one thing, very evident on the other hand: patience, everything happens. A day will come when you will sleep happily every night; I promise you.
Photos | iStock
In Babies and more | Why does white noise calm some babies? According to one study, white noise generating machines could be harmful to babies' ears
