Will white noise help your baby or toddler sleep better?

Baby and toddler sleep is not controlled by something external like white noise.

• There is no reliable evidence to show that white noise will help your baby or toddler sleep better, as a pattern over time so that your own sleep and wellbeing also improve.

• Concerns have been raised about the immediate and cumulative effects of white noise on our babies' sensitive developing auditory systems.

It's not that it's wrong to turn on white noise at your small child's bedtime, remembering to use it for short periods of time and placing the machine at a safe distance. Experimenting is a great strength as you care for your baby or toddler!

It's just that an infant sleep machine is yet another expense which lacks convincing evidence to support its use, and which makes life more complicated than it needs to be. We want your little person's sleep to be flexible and to happen easily wherever you are that evening as you live a rich, full and meaningful life, whether it's in a restaurant with friends, enjoying a card game at your relative's place while little cousins run around, or wandering the night markets.

To my mind, white noise belongs to a more old-fashioned concept of what it is to put our babies and toddlers to sleep, one which often makes parents feel stressed and miserable. That's because using white noise can make us feel as if it's our job to make our little one sleep.

But sleep is not something we can teach little people to do. Sleep is under the control of rising sleep pressure, and the settings on the body clock. Your baby or toddler's body clock is set by environmental cues over time, such as ebb and flow of noise in the environment. Although the environmental cues associated with the Big Sleep at night are of quietness, darkness and less activity than in the daytime, healthy sleep doesn't require the removal or masking of all noise from your small child's surroundings.

Sleep is only brought on by your baby's or toddler's inner biological experience of high sleep pressure.

Selected references

Hugh SC, Wolter NE, Propst E, Gordon K, Cushing S. Infant sleep machines and hazardous sound pressure levels. Pediatrics. 2014;133(4):677-681.

Sezici E, Yigit D. Comparison between swinging and playing of white noise among colicky babies: a paired randomised controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Nursing. 2018;27:593-600.

Spencer JA, Moran DJ, Lee AR, Talbert D. White noise and sleep induction. Archives of Disease in Childhood. 1990;65(1):135-137.