Parents will do anything to get their babies to sleep, but experts are warning against the popular trend of using “white noise.”
The noise, which resembles television or radio static, has become increasingly popular, both from machines and phone apps, with up to a third of parents now using some kind of background noise as a sleep aid for their infants.
Sleep experts and parenting gurus argue that constant background noise makes it harder for the brain to focus on sudden, intrusive noises that can break your concentration or wake you up.
But recently, experts are beginning to realize that white noise, and its cousins pink and brown noise, may be doing more harm than good when it comes to children’s language development.
According to Dr April Benacic, a global sleep expert at Rutgers University, this could become a “public health issue”.
Dr April Benacic’s research on infants has raised concerns about the impact of white noise on infant language development.
A Sleep Doctor survey found that 37% of parents said their children needed some kind of background noise to help them fall asleep, with white noise being the most popular method (45%).
Dr Benacic, who is also director of the Institute for Early Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, told DailyMail.com that using these sounds with babies could disrupt the development of language skills that begin before birth.
The monotony of white noise can interfere with “acoustic mapping,” the brain network that helps babies understand and learn language.
Your baby’s brain is constantly interpreting every sound to build language networks, make sense of repeated sounds, know what to listen for, and develop their native language.
An infant’s brain can distinguish changes in sounds that occur in tenths of a millisecond, allowing the brain to focus on the smallest units of language and facilitating the brain connections needed to process sound.
Dr Benacic, who has studied 5,000 families in his lab, told DailyMail.com: “We don’t know what (the brain) is going to hear, but it is hearing sounds acoustically.”
“Young babies can hear all the differences in the world, even the slightest differences.”
Hearing these acoustic changes is important when children are awake, but it’s especially important when babies are asleep, Dr Benacic says, because that’s when most of the brain’s neuroplasticity — its ability to evolve and adapt by creating new neurons and networks — occurs.
However, if parents use white noise, babies who sleep 12-18 hours a day will be exposed to it for hours.
And because there’s no change, “it’s telling your brain that there’s nothing going on and you don’t need to hear this,” so the brain can’t build networks and loses crucial time to establish language skills, Dr Benacic said.
Gabriella, 35, from New Jersey, used white noise with her first son and started using it again with her second, but her pediatrician encouraged her to switch to more variety. Now her youngest falls asleep to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and stays asleep.
She told DailyMail.com: “It’s a bit mind-boggling for us to hear that song over and over all night, but for him it’s better than listening to white noise.”
Dr Benacic told the website that he’s “not a big social media user”, but started seeing influencers and parents posting about white noise a few years ago.
She said: “When I found out all these parents were using white noise I thought, oh my God, what are they doing to their kids? I think this is going to become a public health issue.”

Dr April Benacic told DailyMail.com that babies need to be exposed to a variety of sounds to help with their language development.
Dr. Benacic and her team began working with influencers and sleep consultants and discovered that while they had been told about the benefits of white noise and seen articles promoting the sound, they hadn’t actually read the studies, which were poorly conducted and reached insignificant conclusions.
She thought: “Well, where are[people]getting this information?”
But when Dr Benacic tried to raise awareness of the issue, she faced criticism. “The backlash was huge. We asked, ‘Why are people getting so excited about this?'”
“They’re so invested and they don’t want to hear the science. There’s no evidence that you’ve harmed the child specifically. I would say there’s no hard evidence that this will cause lasting problems, but we just don’t know.”

White noise can come from an app on your phone or from a sound machine (stock photo)
Sarah, a 37-year-old mother from New York, told the website that she used white noise on her baby until a friend told her about the dangers.
“I changed the sound on the machine right there on the phone while my son was taking a nap,” his mother said.
Dr Benacic, who developed his own neuroscience-based audio device Smarter Sleep, recommends a variety of soundscapes, even sounds as small as ocean waves or a beating heart.
She told DailyMail.com: “I want all children to have the advantage of having everything to support them, but parents don’t really understand what’s going on as the brain is forming, and that’s a shame because we should have gotten that message out a long time ago.”
“There’s some information out there, but people don’t understand how important the acoustic environment is.”
Dr. Benacic also said it’s difficult to educate families because they can’t actually see the changes happening.
She told the website: “Parents can’t see that (their children’s) brains are changing or that their developmental trajectory is improving, but we know it because we’ve seen it.”
She often meets parents who say, “I used white noise with all my kids and they were fine and had really good vocabulary development,” and she asks them, “But how much strain did it put on your brain to compensate?”