Quality time with babies is ‘key’ to better sleep

FOR parents having trouble getting their babies to sleep, an American study suggests being emotionally available to baby’s needs is key to a good night’s sleep.

The study suggests it’s not so important how much time parents spend with children or what they do at bedtime, but rather the quality of that time.

Being emotionally receptive would include things like gazing at your infant while breastfeeding, or noticing if your child is not interested in a book, and so putting the book down. Some experts have advised parents set a strict sleep schedule and keep routines that become associated with going to sleep, such as reading a book and dimming the lights.

When parents provide reassurance through emotional communication, the researchers believe that it lets children know they are in a safe environment. They argue that feeling safe is ultimately a prerequisite for achieving deep sleep.

“Bed time can be a very emotional time. It heralds the longest separation of the day for most infants,” said study researcher Douglas Teti, professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University. “It struck me that going to sleep, and sleeping well, is much easier for some young children than others, and I wanted to assess what factored into this, and what parents and children contribute to sleep patterns.”

This study involved 35 families with infants 24 months of age and younger, and is the first to use multiple video cameras in the infants’ and parents’ bedrooms to capture parent- infant interactions at night. Fathers were also included, but since only seven of them interacted with their infants for a long enough time (at least two to three minutes) during bedtime, the researchers focused on maternal bedtime behaviour only.

Infants whose mothers were more emotionally available during bedtime showed fewer disruptions when settling to sleep and less sleep disruption overall compared with infants whose mothers were less emotionally available.

Mothers rated as more emotionally available were less likely to have to return to their infants at bedtime and less likely to report their infants had sleep difficulties.

For instance, one emotionally available mother responded to her six-month-old infant’s cries during breastfeeding. “She continuously gazed at the infant’s face and, whenever the infant vocalised, she responded promptly (eg ‘It’s OK.’),” the researchers write in an issue of the Journal of Family Psychology.

“Mothers who were more emotionally connected to their infants during breastfeeding had infants who settled to sleep quicker and were more likely to ‘sleep through the night’ than infants whose mothers were not as emotionally connected,” Teti said.

Another mother “used stern directives with her child during book-reading whenever the child got up out of bed,” and “continually attempted to engage the child in the book despite clear signs that the child was losing interest (eg, child was fidgety and continually turned his attention elsewhere),” the researchers noted. The result: “The child got up and left the room four times before he eventually fell asleep.”

The results showed what mothers do with their infants at bedtime may be less important to the infant’s sleep success than the emotional quality that underlies these activities. This contradicts past research, which suggested prolonged close physical contact with a parent undermines babies’ ability to sleep on their own.