A popular parenting technique that has been used on babies for decades may stunt development, a new report has found.
Experts are warning against using white noise to lull children to sleep, whether from a car or a phone app.
The noise, which sounds similar to radio or television static, continues to grow in popularity, with 37.2% of parents saying their children need background noise to fall asleep, according to a survey by wellness company Sleep Doctor.
Sleep professionals and parenting influencers have claimed that the technique distracts young brains from loud, disruptive noises that can wake a baby.
However, experts are now noticing that white noise – and similar pink and brown noise – can actually harm a child’s language development, the Daily Mail reported.
Dr. April Benasich, a sleep expert at Rutgers University, told the media that it could even lead to a “public health issue.”
Benasich, who is also the director of the Rutgers Child Study Laboratory and has worked with 5,000 families in her lab, said the monotonous tone of white noise can interfere with the “acoustic map,” the network in the brain that helps babies learn and understand the language. .
A baby’s brain takes in every sound and interprets it to create its own language network, and the brain especially takes into account repeated sounds to determine which are vital lessons for everyday language, and can distinguish sound variations – even ” small, small changes”. – that happen in just a tenth of a millisecond.
But the most important time to process sounds is when babies are asleep, because that’s when most of the brain’s neuroplasticity occurs—when it absorbs information and adapts to the experiences around us.
Since babies sleep 12 to 18 hours a day, being exposed to white noise for a long time with zero change in pitch will tell the brain “it doesn’t need to hear this because nothing is happening” – so the brain is not setting up new networks.
“When I realized that all the parents were using white noise … I was like, oh my God. What are people doing to their children? I think it’s going to be a public health issue,” Benasich told the Daily Mail, adding that she’s not often on social media, but has noticed that many parents use the technique.
“Oh my god, where are they [people] getting this information from?” she asked.
“It’s just that parents don’t really understand what’s going on when the brain is growing, and that’s sad because we should have gotten that message a long time ago.”
Along with her team, Benasich collaborated with influencers and sleep consultants and found that while they had learned about the benefits of white noise, they hadn’t actually read some studies, which may have drawn irrelevant conclusions and may have been poorly conducted.
When Benasich tried to inform about the negative aspects, she was met with criticism.
“The crash was amazing. We asked, ‘Why are people so mad about this?’ They are so invested and don’t want to listen to the science. There is no evidence that you specifically harmed your child. We would say there is no strong evidence that this will cause lasting problems, but we don’t know,” she said.
Instead of white noise, she suggested using soundscapes with any kind of variation, even small ones like ocean waves or heartbeats.
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