I Have A Newborn Right Now. The Sound Machine Is Not Supposed To Be That Loud.

white noise is the one newborn thing nobody argues about. it is on every registry, it comes up in the first week from every direction, and i have never once heard somebody push back on it.

what does not come up is how loud it is.

i have a newborn in the house right now, and i did not know this number either until i went looking for it. so this one is not me telling you something i knew from experience. it is me telling you what a team of ear surgeons found when they actually put a meter on these things.

somebody measured them

in 2014 a group out of the hospital for sick children in toronto bought fourteen infant sleep machines off the shelf, the ordinary kind sold in north america, and measured what came out of them.

at maximum volume, held about a foot away, which is to say sitting on the crib rail: all fourteen went over 50 decibels. three of them went over 85.

at about a yard away, on a nearby table, all fourteen were still over 50. at the furthest distance they tested, across the room, thirteen of the fourteen were still over 50.

two numbers make that mean something.

50 decibels is the level where, for babies in hospital nurseries and intensive care units, “more than an hour of noise exposure would exceed the recommended maximum noise level.” that is the ceiling the people who look after the most fragile newborns in the building work to.

85 decibels is the recommended workplace limit for a grown adult across an eight hour shift. three of these machines, sold to be put next to a baby’s head all night, cleared the number a factory has to hand out ear protection at.

the honest limits of that

i am not going to oversell this, because the oversell is how this whole industry works and i am tired of it.

this is a measurement study. they measured machines, not babies. there is no line of children behind this paper who lost their hearing to a sound machine, and nobody has shown that. the researchers’ own point was narrower and, i think, harder to argue with: the adult workplace limit may not be protective enough for an infant whose hearing is still developing, and these products ship with a volume range that goes well past anything anybody needs.

so this is not a scare. it is a dial. the dial goes much higher than it should and nothing on the box tells you where to stop.

the fix is free and it is three things

distance. not in the crib. not on the rail. not clipped to the side. across the room, on a dresser, as far from the baby’s head as the room allows. this is the one that does the most and costs nothing.

in a safe sleep sense there was never a reason to have it in there anyway. nothing goes in the crib. no toys, no wedges, no blankets, no electronics, nothing. a clean crib is not a safe crib covers the rest of that, including the cord, which is its own separate reason.

volume. low. if you have to raise your voice to be heard over it when you are standing at the crib, it is too loud. that is not a published threshold, it is a rule of thumb, and i am labeling it as one.

duration. the researchers suggested running it for a stretch rather than all night. i will be honest that this is the one i find least realistic at three in the morning. if you are going to run it all night, run it quiet and run it far away, and you have done the two that matter most.

none of the products below are ones i can vouch for

saying that before the list rather than after it. i have a newborn and i have opinions about the category, but not one of the seven things linked in this post is something i can tell you i have personally used and loved. every one of them is a category call, and i have put the reason next to each.

if you are buying a sound machine, the feature that matters is not the size of the sound library. it is whether the thing is small enough and plain enough that you are willing to put it somewhere other than the crib, and whether it has a timer. everything else on the box is decoration.

what is actually doing the work in that room

here is the thing i would say if you only had one newborn purchase in you, and it is not the noise.

dark. blackout curtains do more for a baby in a room than volume ever will, they keep working with nothing plugged in, and they are still working in june when the sun is up at five. the thing to check before buying is whether the panel is actually wider than your window, because the light comes in at the edges, not through the middle.

then a dim nightlight for the feeds, so you are not switching the ceiling light on at two in the morning and resetting the whole room. dim and warm, not bright and white. the feature to look for is a light you can aim at a wall instead of at a face.

a bassinet if you do not have one, because sharing a room and not a bed is the arrangement that is actually recommended for the first months, and a bassinet is what makes that possible in a normal sized bedroom.

and warmth, which is the one people get most wrong in october. a blanket is not the answer and never was. a blanket is not how you keep a baby warm is the long version. the short version is a sleep sack or a zip up swaddle, worn, over pajamas, with nothing loose in the crib at all.

one hard stop on the swaddle: the moment there is any sign of rolling, the arms come out, and that is not a gradual thing you ease into. the sleep sack is what you move to.

and a pacifier at sleep time, which is in the safe sleep recommendations on its own merits rather than as a soothing trick. a pacifier is not a bad habit, and i would rather you heard that from somebody who is not trying to wean your baby off something.

the part that is not a product

a newborn waking up is not a problem with your room. i wrote a whole post taking back the advice i gave in 2019 about this, and i was wrong about newborn sleep is still the most useful thing on this blog if you are in the thick of it.

no sleep training before four to six months. back sleeping, firm flat surface, empty crib, cool rather than cozy, room sharing rather than bed sharing. and anything about your particular baby goes to your pediatrician, not to me and not to a sound machine review.

but the volume knob is yours, it is free, and you can move the machine across the room tonight in about four seconds. of all the newborn advice you are being buried under this week, that one is the easiest thing on the list to act on.

some of the product links above are affiliate links, which means i may earn a commission if you buy through them at no extra cost to you. #ad #WalmartPartner. as i said up top, none of the seven products in this post are things i can tell you i have used. each one is framed as a category call with the reason attached, in the sentence that links it.