App review: Help baby (or you) get to sleep

When traditional methods fail or aren't practical, white noise or other electronically generated sound is the method du jour of getting babies to go to sleep. A few decades ago, parents used car rides around the block for this purpose—but these days, the most popular baby books suggest soothing sounds. 

You could buy a sound machine, and the last time Consumer Reports tested them, they worked almost as well as drugs in putting survey respondents to sleep. But an inexpensive and convenient way to play soothing sounds to your little one, or to you if you're sleep-challenged, is with an app on your mobile phone, which plays the sounds over its built-in speaker. (Of course, when your phone's in use calming your kid, you can't use it yourself, so you won't be able to catch up on your texts during nap time.)

"White noise" is random sound and covers a broad range of
frequencies, so it can mask other more annoying sounds [corrected]. Pediatricians and sleep experts such as Dr. Harvey Karp, author of The Happiest Baby On The Block, and Dr. Marc Weissbluth, author of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, suggest using white noise to help calm small babies. Sound generators and apps can also create other soothing sounds, including those of a waterfall or rain-forest sounds.

I've tried an app called Relax And Sleep Plus for Android with my baby. I starting using the app with my 11-month-old in his early infancy, and has worked like a charm. If we are out and about during nap time, over-stimulation can be an issue, but I can rely on the app's white noise to help lull him into la-la land. I tuck my phone in the pocket behind him on the stroller, and he is asleep in no time. 

I also use white noise for my little one when he is in his crib at home. My husband is far more willing to crank the volume on his smart phone than I am, though. Being a paranoid new mom, I've worried that the decibel level could cause hearing loss, so I took it upon myself to write to my friend Greg Joswiak, lead developer for iPhone, to ask him how loud the iPhone goes. I figured that would give me a good indication of the volume of other smart phones like mine.

He wrote back to assure me that my worries were typical "new mom" woes. He did not answer my question with a specific decibel level, though; Apple does not disclose decibel levels for U.S. phones, and Android phones have decibel capacities that vary as well. 

I am not an otolaryngologist, so I can't provide tips on preserving your child's hearing. But I do suggest being cautious (see our advice on protecting hearing from Consumer Reports' Health site). Don't put your noise app at full volume right next to your sleeping baby or pipe the sound to him via headphones. Those tips are probably obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is that you don't want the phone to be too close to your child for reasons that include ongoing research into the health effects, if any, of holding cell phones close to the head. I put the phone under the crib or on a table nearby where the baby sleeps. 

Overall, I find Relax and Sleep Plus for Android to be a very good noise app with various options. You can choose the standard white-noise setting or even go for something a bit more wild, such as ocean, birds, frogs, or wolves. (Wolves? Who finds the sound of howling wolves relaxing?) 

You can set the preferred sound and the duration it will play. You can choose to have the noise fade out quietly, which I like, because sometimes I think the abrupt ending of the white noise wakes my son up. 

Other options in the app include the ability to use it as an alarm clock. (Maybe those wolves could come in handy for waking you up instead of inducing sleep.) I don't use it as an alarm clock, though; I live by the never-wake-a-sleeping-baby rule. 

You can also mix different sounds in the app. For instance, maybe you want the white noise followed by a rainforest sound. You currently cannot add your own sounds, but if there is a sound you really want in the app, you can tell the developers by e-mailing relaxandsleep@mizusoft.com. (I can only imagine what kind of suggestions they must get.) 

Relax and Sleep Plus costs $2 in the Android Marketplace, but there is a free version that has fewer setting options and noises to choose from. The app has high praise in the user review section, no doubt from adults who either used it themselves or were able to sleep well because their baby slept well. There appears to be no version of this app for the iPhone, at least not yet, but you can get the app for computers that run Windows, OS X, or Linux.

Oh, one other tip from someone who has made this mistake many times: Turn your phone on Airplane Mode when using a white noise app for baby or yourself. There is nothing worse than having a sleeping child disturbed by a call from a telemarketer.

—Natali Morris