Parents find older babies sleep better in own room

Parents who put babies to sleep in their own rooms report the infants get more rest and have more consistent bedtime routines than parents who share a room or a bed with their babies, a recent study suggests.

The study focused on infants six to 12 months old. Researchers examined data from a questionnaire completed by parents of 6,236 infants in the US and 3,798 babies in an international sample from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand. All participants were users of a publicly available smartphone app for baby sleep.

Overall, about 37 percent of the babies in the US and 48 percent in the international sample slept in a separate room, the study found.

In both groups, parents of infants who slept in a different room reported that babies had earlier bedtimes, took less time to fall asleep, got more total sleep over the course of 24 hours and spent more time asleep at night.

“There are a number of possible reasons that babies sleep better in their own room,” lead study author Jodi Mindell, associate director of the Sleep Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said by email.

“One main reason is that they are more likely to self-soothe to sleep,” Mindell added.

Parents who put babies to sleep in a separate room were less likely to feed infants to help them fall asleep at bedtime or when they awoke during the night, according to the study, published online last Aug. 11 in Sleep Medicine.

When babies had their own rooms, parents also perceived bedtime to be less difficult.

One limitation of the study was that parents with concerns about infant sleep might be more likely to download an app and complete a sleep questionnaire than parents without these concerns, the authors note. This might mean the results were not representative of what would happen in a larger population of households.