Sleep cycle: why baby naps best next to the washing machine

Babies should not be put in a dark, quiet room for a nap but in a light room with background noise like a washing machine, an expert has said.

- Victoria Allen

Prof Helen Ball, a scientific adviser for the charity the Lullaby Trust who has carried out sleep research with more than 5,000 parents and babies at Durham University, said long daytime naps are like "mini night-times" that can disrupt babies' sleep when they properly go to bed.

She believes parents should let babies and toddlers snooze naturally in a light room, with background noise so they wake up themselves if they have had enough sleep.

Ball, an anthropologist who won a Queen's Anniversary prize for her research on parent and infant sleep in 2018, said: "The pressure to control babies and give them scheduled sleeps, so they fit in with our clock-driven routines, is getting worse now we have so many baby sleep coaches, baby sleep monitors and apps about 'wake windows' which claim to calculate exactly when a baby needs to nap.

"Babies, like us, biologically need to build up sleep pressure - tiredness from energy expended in the brain through the day - to fall asleep. So they naturally nap at different times on different days, depending on whether, for example, they have been for a walk with lots of tiring sensory stimulation, or have been inside.