Wednesday, December 9, 2009

White Noise for Babies

If you're having trouble getting your new baby to sleep, you are certainly not alone. Thousands of parents across the world are dealing with fussy or colicky babies right now, and sometimes they're dealing with babies who have trouble falling asleep for no apparent reason.

While at first it can be a fun idea to rock your baby to sleep every night - this might even become a part of your bedtime routine - it's not fun anymore when you have to be holding or rocking your baby for him or her to sleep at all. You end up losing even more sleep than new parents typically do, and your baby starts to build unhealthy sleeping habits that may end up making him have trouble falling asleep without assistance for years to come.Instead of dealing with all the fallout of these infant sleep troubles, why not try giving your baby a healthy way to fall asleep? One way to start building good, healthy sleeping habits is to put a sound machine in your baby's room. These machines, which are easy to find in today's market, come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and price ranges. Many of them play different types of sounds for your baby to fall asleep to.

These machines are effective for a couple of reasons. First, they drown out small background noises that might be waking your lightly-sleeping baby up when he is first falling asleep, and second, they simulate the type of white noise your baby would have been constantly surrounded by in the womb.

No matter how hard you try to keep your house quiet when the baby is trying to sleep, you can't get rid of all the noises. The stairs might creak when you're going up and down, or the dog might start barking at the mailman. If you have other, older children, keeping the house quiet is even more difficult. A sound machine can help mask these noises so that your baby doesn't hear them and startle awake just as she's falling asleep.

Check out this article which discusses that white noise is safe for babies.

posted by Melissa Nathans at 11:21 AM