Popular sleep hack for infants could spark public health issue, expert warns

A popular parenting technique that has been used for babies for decades could potentially stunt development, a new report found.Experts are warning 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, experts 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 networ...