A popular parenting technique that has been used for babies for decades could potentially stunt development, a new report found.
Warnings may be warranted against using white noise to get children to sleep, whether from a machine or a phone app.
The noise, which sounds similar to radio or television static, keeps increasing in popularity, with 37.2% of parents saying their children need some background noise to sleep, according to a survey by wellness company Sleep Doctor.
Sleep professionals and parenting influencers have claimed that the technique distracts a young brain from loud, disruptive noises that could wake a baby.
However, some are now noticing that white noise — and similar pink and brown noise — may actually harm a child’s language development, the Daily Mail reported.
Dr. April Benasich, a sleep expert at Rutgers University, told the outlet it might even lead to a “public health issue.”
Benasich, who is also the director of Rutgers’s Infancy Studies Laboratory and has worked with 5,000 families in her lab, said that the monotonous tone of white noise can interfere with “acoustic mapping,” the network in the brain that helps babies learn and understand language.
A baby’s brain takes in every sound and interprets it to set up its language network, and the brain especially takes note of repeated sounds to determine which are vital learning for everyday language, and it can differentiate sound variations — even “teeny, tiny changes” — that occur in just one-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 — when it absorbs information and adapts to experiences around us — occurs.
Since babies sleep 12 to 18 hours per day, being exposed to white noise for that long with zero variation in sound is “telling the brain you don’t need to listen to this because there’s nothing going on” — so the brain isn’t setting up new networks.
“When I found out that all parents were using white noise … I was, like, oh my God. What are people doing to their kids? I think it’s going to be a public health issue,” Benasich told the Daily Mail, adding that she isn’t on social media often but has noticed many parents using this technique.
“Oh, my goodness, where are [people] getting this information from?” she wondered.
“It’s just that parents don’t really understand what’s going on when the brain is getting set up, and that’s sad because we should have gotten that message out a long time ago.”
Along with her team, Benasich collaborated with influencers and sleep consultants and found that while they had learned the benefits of white noise, they hadn’t actually read some studies, which may reveal insignificant conclusions and may have been poorly conducted.
When Benasich tried to inform about the negative aspects, she was met with criticism.
“The pushback was amazing. We asked, ‘Why are people so crazy about this?’ They’re so invested and they don’t want to hear the science. There’s no evidence that you particularly harmed your child. We would say there’s no hard evidence that this is going to 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 such as ocean waves or a heartbeat.
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