Parents will do anything to get a baby to sleep – but experts are warning against the popular trend that uses ‘white noise’.
The noise sounds similar to television or radio static, and whether it’s from a machine or phone app, it’s boomed in popularity, with up to a third of parents using some kind of background noise as a sleep aid for their infants
Sleep professionals and parenting influencers have claimed a steady background sound helps the brain focus less on sudden, disruptive noises that could break concentration or wake them up.
But recently, experts are realizing white noise, and similar pink or brown noise, may do more harm than good when it comes to kids’ language development.
It could even lead to a ‘public health issue’, according to Dr April Benasich, a world-leading sleep expert at Rutgers University.
Dr April Benasich’s work with infants raises concerns over the effect white noise could have on their language development
A survey by The Sleep Doctor found 37 percent of parents said their children needed some type of background noise to fall asleep. The most popular method (45 percent) was white noise.
Dr Benasich, who is also director of Rutgers’s Infancy Studies Laboratory, told DailyMail.com using the sound for babies may disrupt the formation of their language skills, which begins even before they are born.
White noise’s monotonous tone can interfere with a child’s ‘acoustic mapping,’ the brain’s network that helps babies understand and learn language.
Babies’ brains are constantly interpreting every sound to set up language networks, and they take in which sounds are repeated to determine what is important to listen to and develop their native language.
An infant’s brain can differentiate variations in sounds that occur in a tenth of a millisecond, which helps the brain focus on the smallest unit of language and promotes brain connections to process sounds.
Dr Benasich, who has worked with 5,000 families in her lab, told DailyMail.com: ‘[The brain] isn’t sure what it’s going to be listening to, but it is listening to sounds acoustically.
‘Young infants can hear the differences between every single sound in the world… sounds that are teeny tiny changes.’
While hearing these acoustic variations is important while a child is awake, it is especially vital while babies are asleep, Dr Benasich said, because that is when most of the brain’s neuroplasticity — the ability to evolve and adapt by creating new neurons and networks — occurs.
But if parents are using white noise, infants, who sleep 12 to 18 hours per day, are being exposed to it for hours on end.
And because it has zero variation, Dr Benasich said it’s ‘telling the brain you don’t need to listen to this because there’s nothing going on,’ and so the brain isn’t setting up networks, missing out on crucial time to establish language skills.
Gabriella, a 35-year-old from New Jersey, used white noise with her first son and began using it with her second until her pediatrician recommended she switch to something with variation. Now, her youngest falls — and stays — asleep to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
She told DailyMail.com: ‘It drives us a little insane, listening to that song over and over again all night, but it’s better for him to listen to that than to white noise.’
Dr Benasich told this website she wasn’t ‘a big social media person,’ but a few years ago she began seeing influencers and parents posting about white noise.
She said: ‘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.’
Infants need exposure to variations in noises to help their language development, Dr April Benasich told DailyMail.com
Dr Benasich and her team began collaborating with influencers and sleep consultants and discovered they had been taught the benefits of white noise or seen articles touting the sound, but hadn’t actually read studies — which have been poorly conducted and reached insignificant conclusions.
She thought: ‘Oh my goodness, where are [people] getting this information from.’
However, when Dr Benasich tried to raise awareness of the issue, 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.’
White noise can come from a phone app or a sound machine (stock photo)
Sarah, a 37-year-old mother from New York, told this website she had been using white noise for her infant until a friend told her about the dangers.
‘I changed the sound on his machine right then and there from my phone while he was napping,’ the mom said.
Dr Benasich, who created her own neuroscience-backed sound machine called Smarter Sleep, recommends soundscapes with any kind of variation — even small ones like ocean waves or a heartbeat.
She told DailyMail.com: ‘You want every child to be able to have the advantage of having everything they can to support them… 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.
‘There’s some information out there but people don’t understand how important the acoustic environment is.’
Dr Benasich also said it’s hard to educate families because they can’t actually see the changes occurring.
She told this website: ‘They can’t see that their [child’s] brain is changing or that the trajectory is better but we know it is because we’ve seen it.’
And while she is often met with parents who say: ‘Well, I used white noise with all my children and they’re all fine and their vocabularies are really good,’ she asks them: ‘But how much harder did you make the brain work to compensate for [using white noise]?’
