A sleep consultants’ thoughts on BBC article Walk and Wait
You may have seen the recent BBC article titled ‘Walk and wait is the best strategy to stop baby crying’ - full article here. The article reviews a study of 21 babies around three months of age and their mothers to examine four different approaches to calming a crying baby. The approaches were being held by their walking mothers, being held by their sitting mothers, lying in a still crib and lying in a rocking crib.
The results showed that when the mothers carefully walked around whilst holding their baby the crying baby calmed down and their heart rates slowed within 30 seconds. It was a similar effect when the babies were placed in a rocking cot.
The article suggests that maternal contact alone may not be enough to soothe, motion is important too.
To combat the sleepy baby stirring and crying again when being placed in their cot, the study found that sitting and holding the baby for five to eight minutes after the walk will help with them settling in their cot as by that point they will have slipped into a deeper stage of sleep.
My thoughts on the full article are… for the age of the children in the study (three months), where you wouldn’t want to be doing any form of sleep training, this is super appropriate.
Absolutely, walking can be very calming for babies that need motion to calm down (we did lots of walking at night with my daughter when she was tiny). Walking is also much less strenuous on you, the parent, than rocking which can become very hard, very quickly and can also sometimes be too much stimulation for the baby. Rocking can also being something that the baby can become very reliant on very quickly and then that’s another sleep crutch for you to have to break down the line.
The holding the baby when calm can be good for helping break any build up of association with motion that the baby may get. And at this age it is still okay for you to be putting the baby back in their cot/crib asleep, however, ideally the baby will be going into their cot/crib awake. At three months you’re not far from the four month regression where your baby’s sleep will change and they wake regularly when between sleep cycles. If the baby is dependent on a walk and cuddle to get them back to sleep you may find yourself doing that every two hours throughout the night. At four months, provided there are no health issues and the baby is a good size they can definitely be sleeping longer or even sleeping through!
In summary, my thoughts are, walk and wait is absolutely a good call when you’re in those early days but as you near the four month mark you want to be trying to encourage independent sleeping to help you transition your way through the fourth trimester!
